


One Librarian, two killers

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, F/M, M/M, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-07 21:23:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1914339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything was going great until Malik came home to find Altair and Maria trying to kill one another in the very most literal sense ever.  Then he had to deal with terrorists, corrupt government officials, secret assassin brotherhoods, and trying to figure out who he was the most angry at: himself, his spy girlfriend or his assassin boyfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this idea came to me as a joke and then I couldn't stop from writing it. it is meant to be taken with the same level of seriousness you would take an action movie. basically, none whatsoever.

Malik collected facts.

Maria hummed when she cooked. Altair only washed his hair every three days. Maria listened to the weather channel in the morning even if she had an office job. Altair hated airline peanuts. Maria liked to wear baseball caps and long pony tails. Altair produced heat like a furnace but he still wore long-sleeve shirts any day the temperature wasn’t over a hundred. Maria slept best on her left side. Altair was ticklish under his chin. 

All these things, all these facts and things that he’d stowed away in the years they had built a life together and not once (not even once) had he found a single bit of evidence to support the conclusion that set their house on fire.

\--

On a Wednesday, Malik had a migraine that drove him out of the stacks at work where the smell of so many pages aggravated the crushing pain in his skull. He was blurry-and-queasy as he blindly searched for the pills that would alleviate the pain in his skull. His boss was an abstract shape through his squinted-shut eyes with a halo of unbearable light behind him. But the diluted motion of his voice was conclusive enough. 

‘Go home’ his boss said. ‘I’ll call Maria to get you.’

Malik laid across the couch in the employee’s lounge until Maria tiptoed in on stocking-feet to scoop him up and guide him out through the blinding light of day to her deliciously cold car. It was the middle of January and there was snow in pillowy-white banks here and there in the parking lot but Maria cranked her AC on high and drove them back to the house with a heavy coat over his face to block out the sight-and-sound-and-smell of the world beyond. When they were safely home her arms at his back and her hand against his chest guided him up and into the house.

“You’re a mess,” she said when she left him in a dark room with a bottle of water and the promise to return. 

The migraine medicine made him groggy and the pain made him dull but it was the silent dark that lulled him to sleep. When he woke up (not so much later), his whole body felt like a brick: dense and heavy. He managed to drag himself out into the dim living room. Maria must have pulled the second set of curtains around to block the worst of the light. He lay himself on the couch and turned the TV on with the sound like a whisper and even then it was a miserable pain in his ear.

\--

It was January seventeenth when Robert De Sable—aspiring warlord visiting from overseas—fended off an assassination attempt that fed into something like a riot. It was splashed across the TV screen while Malik lay on the couch. There were dozens and dozens of police cars surrounding the building where De Sable and his rather impressive host of private security had taken cover. The ground beyond the building was spotted here-and-there with body bags and the death toll was counted at seventeen. 

\--

“Are you feeling better?” Maria asked him two hours after the ‘breaking news’ loop had seared itself into Malik’s brain without a single new detail. She turned her head toward the sound of the TV even as she crouched at his side. Her mouth pulled into a sharp frown that looked out of place on her normally-sweet face. 

“Yeah,” Malik said. “Isn’t that where Altair went?” He pointed at the map they’d put up on the screen and Maria frowned all the harder. “Maybe we should call him.”

“Maybe you should,” Maria said, “I’ve got to go back to work if you’re feeling better. I left a stack of unfinished reports on my desk.” She leaned in against him and pressed sweet-sweet kisses to his mouth.

\--

Altair picked up the phone after the sixth ring just when Malik was considering putting it down to save his skull the trouble of having the repetitive sound drill through bone and into the soft pulp of his brain. “Sorry,” Altair said. He was out-of-breath with something pink-like-pain at the corner of his voice. He said, “just ran into one of those turnbuckle things. You’ve got about six yards before airport security gets cranky about my phone.”

“You’re at the airport?” Malik said, “I thought you were there until tomorrow?”

“Well, that was before some insane terrorist-slash-assassin decided to try to enrage the megalomaniac warlord. Company decided that negotiations weren’t worth risking everyone’s life so I got sent home. I guess we’ll be back once everything settles down.” Then a brief pause. Altair’s voice got steadily more even, vastly less pained as it settled into something like his usual sound. “Were you worried about me?”

“No,” Malik said.

“Was Maria?”

“Of course she wasn’t. Why would we worry about you?” But the news was still parading itself across the screen with Robert De Sable’s long-long list of alleged crimes reading like a resume of a prospective anti-Christ. “Just, get home safe.”

“Don’t I always?” Altair said. “Try not to worry too much about me.” 

“Ass,” Malik said. Altair-laughed and Malik smiled into the phone. When they hung up, Malik changed the news to something mindless and went to the kitchen to fish out something easy to heat-and-eat. 

\--

Maria did not come home before exhaustion drove Malik to bed. She must have come home sometime in the middle of the night because Malik woke up with her body curled against his back and her arm around his chest in a hold that was more possessive than she had ever-once-been before. Altair-was-possessive to the point of territorially aggressive but Maria was something more tempered and easy. The two of them—Malik and Maria—had given in to the inevitable of this threesome with the initial understanding that they both loved Altair. Falling in love with one another had been a slow-and-messy process.

“Morning,” Malik said. His hand fit over Maria’s smaller one as she drew in a long breath and tugged at him so he was laying on his back. Her slim body wiggled into place half-across his. He ran his fingers through her long-dark-hair as she wriggled her hand under his T-shirt and pressed her palm across his chest. “Missed you last night.”

“Sorry,” she mumbled. Then she pulled herself up high enough to kiss him. Her body was all comfortable curves as it slid over his and her skin was sleep-hot and moisturizer smooth. 

\--

Breakfast had been (possibly) the most complicated part of navigating the perils of a three-sided relationship. Maria could easily (oh so very easily) eat a pound of bacon in one sitting with zero regrets before devouring toast, eggs, a dish of fruit and whatever else happened to be nearest to her at the table. Altair proclaimed to eat breakfast but it was rarely seen (and the few times he was caught eating early in the day seemed to be suspiciously staged). He was fond of eating anything that was already made. 

‘You’re fucking a guy, Malik,’ Maria had pointed out in the beginning, ‘I’m pretty sure you’re already parting ways with your mother’s religion. Bacon tastes as delicious as sex with us is good. Try it.’

Altair quit eating bacon for months after that statement. Maria pointedly continued to eat it and Malik pointedly refused to eat breakfast with her. The three of them worked themselves up to a screaming match over breakfast food which they settled with bruising sex and brittle apologies.

Maria found him later (days later when he was sure this whole thing was never going to work) she said, ‘I’m a bitch. When we started this thing you said to me _Maria, this isn’t going to be easy so don’t act like you’re winning a lottery here. He’s hard work and I’m hard work and there’s no use pretending like you aren’t._ I agreed to this mess because you seemed like you really got it, the insanity of this idea. That’s what I fell in love with first, how you _get it_ even when the other two idiots you’re in bed with don’t. You could have made a big deal out of this stupid bacon thing and you didn’t. I did and I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry, I was stupid. I’ll give up bacon forever if it’s important to you.’

That was never the point. Maria ate bacon when she wanted it and Altair ate it when it was there and Malik peacefully did not. Breakfast became a non-event in the aftermath.

\--

Except, January eighteenth when Maria made him hot breakfast cereal (because migraines made his stomach sick for days). She was wearing her day-off jeans (so she called them) with her hair twisted up in a pony still damp from the shower and one of his old T-shirts from college hanging off her thinner shoulders. 

“Did you talk to Altair last night?” she asked, “he tried to call me but I was busy at work so I couldn’t take the call. He didn’t leave a message.”

“Yeah, he said he should be home today. They sent him home because of the attack—did you see the news? That Robert De Sable guy and the shootout?” 

Maria made a flat-uninterested noise. She was eating a piece of toast smeared with some fruit jelly that left little pink stains on either side of her mouth. When she sat at his side, she was smiling in that quietly-fond way she did just before she tried to con her way into-or-out of something. (It was a smile he often saw whenever it was her turn to do the grocery shopping, but it was rarely directed at him at the time.) “We should take a weekend,” she said. 

“A weekend? We haven’t done weekends in—a year? A year and a half? I seem to remember that it was you that said they were too expensive and that we’d worked through most of our shit so we didn’t need two day honeymoons once a month.” Although, the weekends had been fun enough while they lasted, the few weekends he’d shared with Maria had largely involved them co-existing in a single room doing nothing interrupted only by sex. Neither of them were prone to wandering or flights of romance but held in place by a practical understanding. 

Maria sighed at him. “Malik,” she said all long-and-drawn-out, “I am aware of what I said and what I’m saying now is that I thought Altair was going to be gone for two more days and I had this whole plan to spend my days off with you tied to the bed as a living sex toy. The fact that some warlord wannabe from another country is sending Altair home too early does not mean I should not get to follow through on my plans.”

Malik snorted. “Why not just wait for him to get home and have two living sex toys?”

“I think we both know that Altair cannot be tied down—remember the time he broke the handcuffs? Remember how he just held them and said oops? And that even if I could figure out some kind of knot that would work, he cannot follow directions once everyone’s lost their clothes.” All these things were so very depressingly true. Altair turned into some kind of fantastic idiot as soon as someone got naked in front of him. The only saving grace was incredible stamina and abundant energy. “Please?” Maria said sweetly. She had her hand on his shoulder, slipping up to the back of his neck as she leaned in close enough their foreheads were nearly touching and he could see her pout clearly. “My vagina needs this, Malik. Only you can make my dreams come true.”

“You’re ridiculous,” Malik mumbled. “I have to work today.”

“No problem, I’ll pack your stuff and you can meet me at the hotel after work. Your dick will thank you, I promise.” Then she kissed him and it tasted like strawberry-jam. 

\--

Work, after being conned into a sex weekend, was dull. Malik managed to catch more of the news during his lunch hour. They had a terrible sketch of a non-human looking person supposedly responsible for the initial assassination attempt. A hundred business suits were reassuring everyone that things were being investigated while they repeatedly said that they had no further comments. It was only De Sable’s reputation that was being trotted out across the screen that seemed to strike a sensational point. 

The man himself was not to be seen, but a man who represented him (a lawyer) declared De Sable to be a business man and rebuked the news for their treatment of him after he was viciously attacked. “My client is not the villain,” was the lawyer’s closing statement.

A few fuzzy camera phone stills were shown and one very grainy video played on a loop for about five minutes showing nothing conclusive save for someone wearing white running. The news reporters kept calling the man an ‘assassin,’ declaring him to have been injured while escaping and saying that police were searching for his whereabouts.

“Can you believe this?” Frederick (his less inspiring coworker) said. 

Malik might have said he could believe anything was possible but Frederick had already turned his attention back to his phone.

\--

It was after-work before Malik realized that he’d forgotten his phone (it was a terrible habit that both Altair and Maria found to be annoying beyond reason). Maria had promised to text him the details about the hotel and when-where to meet her which was effectively useless when he didn’t have his phone on him. The drive back to his house was an unmemorable gray spot in the day. Parking was uneventful.

He even managed to make it up the driveway, across the lawn, to the front door and inside the house without a single problem. It was only after he closed the door that the problems started.

“Malik!” Altair shouted at him. He was running across the living room with the strap of a bag across his chest and one of his hands clutching his side. Any given day the man was fast but he moved with a sudden burst of speed that seemed unreal, his free arm sticking straight out to catch at Malik’s clothes and drag him a precarious three inches to the side just before a knife imbedded itself in the wall where Malik’s face had been. “You said he wasn’t coming!” Altair shouted over his shoulder. 

Maria was across the room with a gun in both hands aiming straight at Malik as Altair shoved himself into the opposite corner with a half muttered ‘fuck’ as he reached into his jacket and pulled out a gun of his own. “He wasn’t supposed to be!” Maria shouted. She stopped for a half second like she was trying to work out what to say. “You forgot your phone. God _damn it_ , Malik.” The words, the tone of voice they were said in, the look her face when she said it was oh-so-completely everything Malik knew about Maria to be _true_ and _real_ that when set against the unbelievable backdrop of overturned furniture, knives embedded in the walls and glinting gunmetal they seemed absurd. 

Altair took the moment of distraction to pull something out of the bag, brought it up to his mouth and then threw it out into the open living room. “Saves me time having to find him!” Altair shouted back at her.

“You son of a bitch!” Maria screamed as she did a quick turn back toward the kitchen. “Don’t you dare take him! Altair I swea—”

But Altair was one-arm around Malik, one hand on the doorknob shoving them out through the door as a loud cracking-bang interrupted Maria’s words. The room filled with light-and-smoke with enough force to shove them out onto the front steps with a clumsy stumble. “Keep walking,” Altair said as he pushed Malik toward his car. The keys were pulled out of Malik’s hands before he had enough brain function to ask where the hell he was supposed to be walking or what the fuck just happened. Altair shoved him into the car and scrambled across the hood to get into the driver’s side. 

Maria was running out onto the law coughing into her sleeve with her gun pointed at the tires before Altair managed to back completely out of the driveway. (Altair had long hated the narrow drive, he ranted about it frequently while they pretended to listen.) “Leave him out of it!” Maria shouted. “Bring him back right now! Altair!”

Altair drove over the curb and down the street, away from the gunshots at their backs. His face was flushed-pink but his whole body was bizarrely still-and-calm as if this were all a part of his everyday life. He looked sideways at Malik for half a second before he cleared his throat. “To be fair, she’s right about the phone thing. You really need to stop leaving your phone places.”

“You think if I had my phone I’d have any fucking idea what’s going on right now?” Malik shouted at him. “What the fuck is going on right now?”

Altair did not hesitate (he had never hesitated, not once in all the time Malik had known him) but said (straight out), “well, as it turns out you are in a committed polygamous relationship with an assassin and the government spy that just almost caught him. What are the fucking odds, Malik?” Then, after an illegal turn through a four way stop, Altair turned to look back over his shoulder like he thought Maria could run thirty five miles per hour. “She’s either really bad at her job or I’m really good at mine.”

“You’re an assassin?” Malik snapped.

“She’s a spy.” Altair said. Then he stopped the car just behind another one and got out. There was blood on hand when he pulled it away from his side but he didn’t move like he’d been hurt at all. For a second, Malik had brief, delusional ideas about running for his life, and then Altair was at the passenger side door to pull him up and out of the car. “Don’t run,” Altair said (like he could read minds), “you’re better off with me than you are with her right now. When De Sable is dead you can go wherever you want.”

“You’re the one that started the shoot out?” Malik said. He yanked his arm away from Altair and only managed to get the man’s hand even tighter around his arm just above his elbow. He was being led like an insolent child and it did nothing to improve the insanity of the moment. 

Altair scoffed at the very-idea. “No. I know how to do my job. De Sable knew I was coming, he started shooting people in the crowd.” The front door of the car they were apparently going to steal was already unlocked so Altair shoved him into it. When he got into the car on the other side he produced a knife out of nowhere and made short work of hotwiring the car. 

\--

Malik did not talk while they drove. There was simply too-much-to-process to bother with putting voice to any of it. Maria was a government spy (according to Altair) and Altair killed people professionally (which really made so much more sense than him being in investments). Being lied to by one of the two of them as consistently and flawlessly as he had been for as long as he had been would have been enough of a shock but being lied to by both of them was almost numbing.

Altair still brushed his damn teeth with bubblegum flavored toothpaste and drank children’s pouch drinks by the boxful. It was _unthinkable_ that he simultaneously managed to kill people so well he was a professional. 

“Who tells you who to kill?” Malik asked. “Is it like a for profit thing? I mean, it must be because you make a lot of money but—will you kill anyone? How do you decide? How did you learn how?”

The one thing that Malik loved-and-hated best about Altair was that he saw no reason to lie (or so Malik thought). There was no sugar coating things and no attempts to be coy. Altair merely blurt the raw truth out and trusted it to be the right thing. He said, “I don’t decide at all. I was born into this life, it’s not something that I chose to do. I’ve known how to kill since before I knew how to read. The Grandmasters watch and they decide who has to die in order for people to retain their basic rights to freedom and for society as a whole to flourish. Sometimes that’s a prospective senator, sometimes a corrupt businessman—sometimes doctors. It varies. I know the people are doing genuine harm to a great deal of people because I watch them and gather the proof before I assassinate them.”

“That does not reassure me,” Malik said.

“I didn’t really think that it would. It’s one of the reasons I never told you.”

“You had the option to tell me?” Malik said. “Doesn’t that go against the whole secret-society of secret assassins secretly guarding the well-being of the world idea?”

Altair parked the car in front of a building with a ‘for rent’ sign pasted over the ply board covering its windows. He turned in his seat enough to glare at Malik in such a way as to wordlessly communicate his displeasure at being questioned in such a ridiculous way. Then he cleared his throat and opened the car door. Malik got out on his own but Altair caught him by the coat and pushed him through the slushy snow toward the side of the building. 

“I need stitches,” Altair said. He went past the empty building, out into the muddy snow beyond it, back into another parking lot, across the street to a family-owned drug store with Malik’s coat still fisted in his hand. 

“Why stitches?” Malik grated out from between his teeth. 

Altair wound his arm around Malik’s shoulders and leaned in close to him with a smile that wouldn’t even as seemed sincere to him before he found out what a liar Altair could be. “I don’t expect you to forgive me, I don’t expect you to be able to understand the full depth of what I’ve just dragged you into but I would at least hope that the many years we have been together have warranted enough kindness on your part to not want to see me dragged away, tortured and publically executed for crimes I did not commit.”

“Except you did,” Malik said back. He put his arm around Altair’s back and followed after him as they walked toward the first aid section. “You just said that you did.”

“They do not want me because they believe I killed people that they do not miss at all. They are chasing me now because De Sable has sent them. He owns enough people in high enough places to have the whole damn world hunting me down if he wants.” Altair picked up a box of bandages, a roll of tape, antiseptic and salve. Then he dragged them back toward the aisle of snack food and bought a bag of some kind of dehydrated meat. When they passed a display of ‘summer essentials’ Altair grabbed a flashlight.

Malik paid at the register while the clerk made a poor attempt at small talk and Altair lounged against the counter and chewed obnoxiously on the strips of foul-smelling beef. 

\--

The day did not end, but they finally came to a stop in a dim shed behind an empty house far away from where they’d ditched the car they’d stolen. Altair collapsed onto the concrete floor of the shed with rough-shaking hands and a groan of pain that seemed to rattle out of him like he’d been holding it in for hours.

After a moment he stripped his coat off and dropped it to the side with a metallic clank. Then he caught the hem of his gray shirt and rolled it up away from his pants. The cloth peeled away from a ragged-looking wound at his side. Malik held the flashlight up over it and had a disconnected moment of queasy shock. Altair’s skin was sticky with dried-blood cracked and oozing fresh blood. His hands were cold(er than they had ever been) and his skin seemed to be a touch too pale. 

“Did Maria do this?” Malik asked.

“No,” Altair said. “She did the whole ‘let me take you in alive’ spiel. I told her that I really couldn’t let that happen and she pulled a gun on me because she couldn’t let ‘that happen’ but it wasn’t until I said that I had to find you that she got really mad. You thought she didn’t love you.”

Malik dragged the bag of supplies over and sat on his knees as he peeled the antiseptic open. “I said she didn’t love me as much as she loved you. And she didn’t before. Did you tell her about De Sable?” 

“You remember the knife embedded in our front hall? Maria only knows what her bosses have told her. They told her that I am a cold-blooded assassin.” Then he was clenching his teeth as Malik worked to get the wound clean. Without the mass of crusted blood over it, the wound wasn’t as gruesome. There was a long slice across Altair’s side that was gaping in the middle where the strips of tape had fallen away. Malik ripped a few new ones and closed the wound before he rubbed the whole thing with salve and covered it with a thick pad of gauze.

“What’s your plan, exactly?” Malik asked. “You think that you’re enough to stop some guy whose hobbies include world domination and ethnic cleansing? I saw the news. I saw how many people he has on his side. Even if you are some sort of assassin, you cannot possibly think you can kill this man.”

“All men can die,” Altair said. He rolled his shirt back down and pulled his coat back on. “No. My plan currently involves getting you somewhere I know you’ll be safe and waiting for reinforcements. Clearly, De Sable’s more of a threat than we originally anticipated and I’m all but public enemy number one at this point.”

Malik shuffled away from him, sat with his back against the opposite wall of the shed and drew his knees up so he could rest his arms across them. “How am I supposed to believe any of this?” he said. “How am I supposed to trust that you’re ‘serving the greater good’?”

Altair shrugged. “I think you have to take everything you know and make that decision. I can’t drag you around forever, Malik. If you don’t come willingly, you’re too big a risk for me to take if I want to live. Obviously, I want you safe and that’s not something Maria can guarantee.” That again, that little dig at Maria and the people that she worked for. That like the way Altair had dragged him out of their home like Malik was simply something to be owned, something precious to barter with. But then Altair shifted with a little hiss of pain and slouched enough to kick his foot against the bottom of Malik’s. “You don’t take anything as well as you’re taking this information. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

The very last thing in the world Malik wanted to do was let Altair slither up to his side and remind him of the many-long-hours, days, weeks, months and years they had spent in close confidence. The very last thing he wanted was Altair’s warmth at his side and the comfortable relief that his presence provided. But it came over him nonetheless. Altair, at his side, with his shoulder against Malik’s and the quiet-peace he always brought. “Is Maria one of De Sable’s men?”

There was a subtle tightening all along Altair’s body, a noticeable stiffness to his spine and consequently the whole of his body. “No,” Altair whispered but it wasn’t a fact, just an unconsidered question. “No,” he said again. Then he turned his head and looked at Malik with his eyebrows drawn down and the pale-cast of his face slowly going pinked with anger. “No.”

“Then why did you take me away from her? Why can’t she protect me just as well as you can?”

“Because she works for a government—I don’t even know which one—that is undoubtedly riddled with men on De Sable’s payroll. Maria can only do what the law and her government allows her to do—I am unburdened by those constraints. Furthermore, if you’re with me and they feel Maria will do anything to catch us, I know that both of you are safe.” Altair grunted in pain again and tipped his head back against the chilly side of the shed. “I need you safe.”

“What constraints burden you?” Malik asked. He fumbled with the zipper of his coat and pulled it up to his chin, wondered at how chilly it had gotten now that they weren’t moving-fast running-for-their lives. Altair tipped his head and frowned at the gesture or the question.

“Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent, hide in plain sight and do not compromise the brotherhood. These three tenets are the only constraints I have.” Then he put his arm around Malik’s shoulders and pulled him in toward his body. The close heat of Altair was enough to drive away the bitter chill but it was not as wholly welcomed as it might have been before. “I am the same person I was yesterday, Malik.”

“You weren’t killing people yesterday,” Malik said. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”


	2. Chapter 2

The cracking sound of fire pulled Maria out of the foggy surreal place where she was standing in the middle of the damn street in the middle of the damn day staring after the car Altair had kidnapped Malik in. She dropped her arms to her sides, let go of the guns and kicked them into the sewer just as the blushing-orange fire in the living room cracked the front windows. Her eyes were watering (from the smoke) and she rubbed at them with sore knuckles as she licked the taste of salt-sweat off her lips. 

The house wasn’t hers (of course it wasn’t, she hadn’t owned anything in years) but it was something like hers and the sinking feeling as the glass shattered was an undeniable twist in her gut. Still, the neighbors would be called out by the sound and fire trucks-and-police officers would follow behind. Maria turned in the direction opposite Altair and started walking.

\--

Maria was in the kitchen when Altair came home. She had set a whole scene, the sort of thing that she might have done three days ago before intelligence came through that proved (beyond all doubt) that the Assassin she’d been assigned to find-and-kill was the same man that blew wet raspberry kisses on her belly and drew false mustaches on Malik’s face in his sleep. 

But the facts were facts; solid and unchangeable. (Maria liked that about facts, how they weren’t traitorous and confusing the way emotions were.) Altair was an Assassin and he was therefore a threat and therefore had to be eliminated. 

The door shut and Maria took in a breath to calm the quake of doubt that stirred in her gut. It bubbled up like acid hope in her throat just before Altair came around the corner from the front door and slapped a smile on his wan face to find her there. He had the long strap of a bag across his chest and instantly noticeable favoring of his right side. For a moment (far too long a moment considering Maria had a gun in her hand only mostly hidden by the kitchen island) Altair was working up to expressing gratitude to find her home (lies) and the food she’d laid out for him (most likely truth).

“Fuck,” he said. He pulled one of the bar stools away from the island and sat on it. His elbow knocked against one of the fine-china dishes and his fingers (paler than normal) pushed through his hair before he dropped it to bang his fist on the countertop. “They told me someone was looking for me.”

“Let me take you in,” Maria said. Not because it was the kindest option but because her gut was rolling over.

His response was a defeated sigh. “Why did it have to be you?”

“If not for you own sake than for Malik.”

Maria had lived with Altair for two and a half years. But she had never once seen him the way he looked when he straightened up on the barstool. The Altair-she-knew was not a trained killer but a slightly ridiculous investment specialist that took up arguing with their neighbors as a fun hobby and was often found sleeping with his head in Malik’s lap while the man read for hours. But this man, this thing that looked at her, was exactly the killer that Maria was looking for.

“No,” Altair said. “Malik is mine.”

“You’re ridiculous if you think dragging him into this is going to end well. Let me take you in and nobody will even care that he exists. If you—”

“This isn’t an argument, Maria.” 

“You don’t get to decide what this is!” she screamed at him. She didn’t mean to slam her gun against the countertop but the jolt of impact ricocheted uselessly up her arm. “You’re a fucking _Assassin_ , Altair. Do you have any fucking idea what kind of danger you put him in? What fucking position I’m in?”

Altair snorted at the notion. His eyes flickered down to the gun in her hand briefly and then back at her fact. “What position is that? Openly mocked at work? What did they say to you when they found out who I was? How long have you been looking for me, anyway?”

“Not very long,” Maria said. (But longer than she’d like to think about.)

But the arrogance broke with the softest little sound of regret. “I really loved you,” he said. _Past-tense_ , no longer applicable.

“Prove it,” Maria snapped. She brought the gun up, “leave Malik out of it.”

His hands went up to the side as his shoulders lifted and dropped again. “I told you, I can’t. So kill me now because I’ll find him if you don’t.”

“No you won’t. I hid him,” she said. Because she thought that she had, because Malik was supposed to be somewhere in a hotel safely tucked out of sight. His name wasn’t on the hotel room and even if it were she had every intention of moving him to a more secure location before Altair found him.

“You don’t know me very well.” Then Altair plucked one of the decorative wooden plaques off the wall and threw it at her face. She blocked it just seconds before his body impacted hers as he went over the island. Their fight was brief-enough, he was fast but the injury on his side slowed him down. Maria was sleep-deprived and sorely out of practice on hand-to-hand and they parted ways with Altair’s quick-quick sidesteps taking him out and beyond the kitchen.

\--

Maria was not her real name; it should have mattered more to her that it wasn’t. Father (the man that took her in) had given it to her when she was six-or-seven years old just before he swept her far-and-away from everything familiar. She grew up in a catastrophe, moved from one war to another, thrown into the streets like an urchin. Children were useful for gathering information (so Father said) because they were not-seen-or-heard. When she was too tall to pass as a child any longer, he slotted her into a pre-existing identity and set her to the task of building a person out of the vague details he’d left for her.

Maria-had-always-been a spy and (when necessary) a killer. Maria had always been on the righteous side of a war that had waged for centuries. Maria was a knight pitted against the so-called Assassins that thought they had the right to decide the fate of humanity by inciting anarchy and chaos. 

“Look now,” Father had said to her when she was twelve-years-old. He held a long white clothe stained here-and-there with dull red slashes of blood he rubbed off his knife. Across the room there was a man tied to a chair. His shadow-dark skin was covered in rolling sweat that made him shine in the tiny flickering light that hung over their heads. There were cuts spread across his bare chest and his arms and blood soaking into the twisted-tight-gag that pulled his face into a deformed shape. His head was tipped back-not-forward as his shoulders and chest heaved for breath and it was obvious to her that he had been screaming only a moment before. “Tell me what you know of Assassins, Maria,” Father said.

“They are the harbingers of chaos,” Maria said. “They hunt and kill any man who promotes or speaks of peace.”

The Assassin tipped his head down again, eyes bright-and-wet in the light. If Maria had believed him capable of such an emotion she might have thought he was sorry for her. It was the sort of thing that was there one-moment-and-gone-the-next because Father was crossing the room with the knife naked-and-sharp in his hand. 

“What must we do when we find an Assassin, Maria?”

Maria looked at the man’s eyes. At how he held her gaze but did not look at her father. He did not struggle against the bindings that lashed his arms to the back of the chair. He relaxed in place as if the realization of death was so welcome and peaceful. “Kill them,” Maria said.

When the Assassin’s blood ran it was thick-and-hot-and- _red_.

\--

“Fuck,” Maria bit into the chill of the air. Her pockets were empty save for the cell phone registered to Maria Thrope (the woman that loved Altair-desperately-and-completely beyond all reason). She didn’t stop walking until she found a plain-silver-four-door car around the curve of a residential street. It was an easy-enough car to steal, easy to blend in seamlessly into crowds and hard to find in a world of silver-four-doors. 

Duty took her straight-away back to headquarters (square-ish building built in the fifties, most likely). It had once been a Fine Furniture store, those letters still set like a stain into the side of the building long after the business had failed and the interior split into two. Malik had brought her lunch here time-and-time again when they were fighting like cats-and-dogs over who could love Altair better than the other. 

“Tell me why you can fight like your life depends on it after dark and you bring me pickles and peanut butter the next day?” she had asked him once. They were an odd couple, always gathering the stares of people with morbid interest etched into their faces. Her skin was winter-pale with a tendency to freckle in direct light and her hair was pitch-black. His skin was a rich tan, darker than his Mother’s ( _God damn it, that Maria knew_ that) but lighter than his Father’s. People didn’t look at them and see anything but the comfortable familiarity of her pale flesh and the shivering discomfort of his foreign skin. 

If Malik saw the stares, he said nothing. In much the same way he leaned against his car with his fingers picking at the curl of peeling paint he kept saying needed to be fixed and never was. His smile (toward her) was a youngish, uncertain thing. “I have lived with myself for many years,” he said, “I do not always react well to things that are not exactly as I like them. Because we are different and because we accomplish things different does not mean that we do not want the same things.”

“So peanut butter and pickles are your attempts at making peace?” she had said.

“They are an apology,” Malik had corrected. “And a reminder that though I am difficult, I care that you are happy.” He was always happy to kiss her, always intent when they touched as if he understood there were so few things they had in common that they couldn’t afford to fuck up the way they understood how to touch one another. 

Maria stood outside the building, looking at phantoms, thinking that wherever Altair had taken him, Malik was gone ( _forever_ ) and it was that thought that raged in her veins and propelled her forward. The building purported itself to be an office: anonymously called Drecker-and-Right with no indication of its actual purpose. Maria had declared herself an administrative assistant but she’d also called herself a paralegal and once a tax expert.

When she shoved open the door and waved off Stan-the-security guard that sat on the barstool by the door, she was just Maria-the-spy on her way to report a(nother) failure.

\--

Sibrand was lounging at the desk just before the (interrogation room) with a short-blue-knife resting lightly against one thigh and a half-eaten apple against the other. He chewed with obnoxious loudness, the rolling-wet-white-flesh of the apple visible through his gaping jaws. He took one look at her and made a low-hissing-sound of universal disapproval. “I see it did not go well.” There was a slight-edge of accent left in the way he spoke, that last bit of German he could not seem to break from. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eyes. 

“Shut up,” Maria said.

Sibrand grinned down at the apple, slid the knife through the fruit with ease and brought it up to rest against his lips. “What’s it like? Fucking one of them?” He stared right at her, at the day-off-jeans and her T-shirt that stretched tight to her skin white and speckled with dirt and Altair’s blood. The jacket she’d pulled over it had done a poor job of keeping the chill away the way it did a poor job of defending her body from Sibrand’s obvious appraisal. He flicked his eyes back up to her face again. “You lived with him for—two years? How the hell did you _not_ know?”

“Shut up,” Maria said again. “Is he in?”

“Oh yeah,” Sibrand said. He leaned his back against the wall and raised the apple to slice off a fresh piece. “I wouldn’t be so eager to see him if I were you, but he’s in there.” He licked the paper-thin-apple slice off the knife and smiled at her with such keen pleasure at her discomfort. 

Maria let herself into the room without knocking and found Father standing with his back to the door, hands quietly one-in-the-other and a spread of fresh printed articles stapled to the wall. The bravado that had sustained her from the curb to this room failed her in the first-faltering-footsteps as she waited for him to turn. Father was a man of extremes, pleased-or-displeased but never (not ever) something in between. When he turned enough to see her, he did not frown but smile ever-so-slightly and extend his arm. 

“It is not good news,” Maria said.

“I have been reviewing his profile,” Father said. He closed his bigger hand around her arm when she extended her hand and pulled her over to place her body directly between his and the wall. The papers were articles detailing the sudden murder of dozens and dozens of men and women. “Jubair believes he was originally from the Levantine Brotherhood, but there is no proof. He is, as of this moment, a ghost. The only proof that he exists at all is the men that he has killed.” Father waved his hand at the wall. “This is a superior adversary.” (There was awe in his voice, dreadful awe.) 

“I didn’t know what he was,” Maria said softly.

“Of course you didn’t,” Father said. His hands folded around her upper arms and the action brought a flicker of fear into her spine when it should have brought comfort. “But, consider, Maria that he also did not know what you were. I have said before you are my pride and this unfortunate circumstance aside, that remains true. You existed under the constant, close scrutiny of a master Assassin and went undetected. That is a feat only few could possibly accomplish.” His fingers dug into the soft flesh of her arms. His breath tightened in his chest and whisked through her hair like ticklish little licks. 

“He escaped,” Maria said.

“This time, perhaps. But we have seen his face now. He will not have such an easy time operating in a world that is aware of his existence.” Then he released her and it took every ounce of her resolve to keep from letting a sigh of relief escape her. Father stepped away, turned back to the desk and picked up a fresh sheet of paper. “And there is the matter of your other lover. He is something of a pressure point for the ghost, isn’t he?”

Father tacked the photo of Malik up on the wall and smiled at it the way he had often smiled at the unfortunate bits of bait he used as traps to capture lesser Assassins. “It’s amazing what people are willing to believe when they hear it on the news.”

“Father,” Maria said. “Give me twenty-four hours to find Altair first. Malik is innocent in this; he knows nothing. He wants no part in it—he barely even votes in elections. The strongest feeling he has ever had is an aversion to sour cream.”

Father looked at her then and the smile had slid off his face. “In twenty four hours, the ghost could slip out of our grasp and be gone. You had a chance to recover him and you failed. Why would I allow you another chance?”

“Because Malik is innocent but Altair will kill him without a second thought if he thinks it’ll slow him down. It’s better to do this quietly, to have people looking for Malik without making it a public spectacle. The news is concentrated on the attempt on Robert’s life and that is where it should stay. Put Altair’s picture on the news as a man wanted for questioning if you have to but I’m telling you, do not use Malik.” It was a great spill of words, full of sound-enough reason but even she could hear the desperation in it. 

“You love this man,” Father said.

“Malik is innocent,” Maria said again. (Like iron, like _steel_.)

Then he sighed, “very well. You have twenty four hours to find the ghost; put his picture on the news if you feel it will help but you are wrong to think so. Assassins are invisible in crowds—this was one of the first lessons you were ever taught, don’t you remember.”

“Of course I do,” Maria said. “But Altair is not alone and he is injured. He will have to be more cautious and that means he will move slowly and obviously. Someone will see him.” She ducked her head and stepped up close enough that Father could hug her if he wanted. His mouth quirked at one side and he put an arm around her and pulled her slight body against his larger one. His lips were damp against the top of her head and his voice rumbled in his throat in that wordless manner he sometimes did when he was feeling fond of her. 

“Do not fail me again,” he said before he released her.

\--

The upstairs of the office building had a set of small cubicle-like bedrooms built in where storage had once been. There was a single shower and a closet full of nondescript clothing to choose from. Maria washed her hair with the same shampoo that made Altair wrinkle his nose up whenever his arm slid around her waist and his cheek brushed against the top of her head.

(And his voice, oh-so-low with the faint scent of early-early morning breakfast, said, ‘I missed you last night.’)

Maria was alone (at last) and the rage that had sustained her was falling right out of the bottom. Her knuckles were bleached-white-bones pressed hard against the awful-blue-tile while the water ran down her back in a tepid rush and fell in noisy splatters to the ground. Her eyes _ached_ from the strain of clenching her jaw. There was a sound caught in her throat, clawing like an _animal_ for its miserable freedom that she couldn’t (could- _not_ ) let escape. 

(Six-days-ago, Altair was in the shower with her. Six-days-ago the constant heat of his skin had been heaven against hers in the chill of the early morning. The water was a fog of heat but Altair-was-hotter with his arms around her back and his mouth pressing smiling-kisses against her neck and the running-wet-rivulets of water that ran over her collarbone into the space between her breasts. Her hands were gripping at his slicked-skin, pulling at him as she tipped her face against his and whispered dirty-sweet-things. Six-days-ago they were smiling at one another as he pressed her back against the slippery-shower-wall and her greedy-hands pulled him closer-and-closer. Six-days-ago she was bright-as-sunshine with the _possibility_ of _life_. He was there with his gasping-mouth and his blushing-pink-cheeks saying, ‘ _I love you, I love you, I love you_ ’ like it was the truth.)

But Maria was made-of-stronger-things. She smashed her fist into the tiles and bared her teeth and tore him out of her memory the way she could have torn out his throat if she’d been near enough to him when he dragged Malik through the door. 

\--

Central command (as it was not popularly called) was two desks pushed together with Sibrand (sans apple) on one and Jubair on the other. They were bent forward over laptops staring at the blinking-white-screens. Father had already sent the poor sketch of Altair to the news media and it played over their heads on a flat screen as the bland-looking-news-anchors stressed the importance of contacting the authorities if anyone saw this-man-in-the-picture.

“Do you think this will work?” Jubair asked. “The Levantine Order are notoriously difficult to track and capture. Perhaps if he were from Italy, or America, perhaps.” His hand lifted away from the keyboard as he motioned at the screen. There was that same slight-admiration in his face that had crossed Father’s face. The air of a man who enjoyed defeating a worthy opponent. 

“He’s wounded,” Maria said. “I made it worse if the sound he made when I punched him in the left side was any indication. Even if he used to be good at hiding in dog houses and eating out of dumpsters he’s been domesticated for seven years and he has a civilian with him.”

“Are you sure the other one is a civilian?” Sibrand asked from across the desk. He was smirking when Maria frowned at him. “I am only saying.”

“Don’t,” Maria said.

“Malik is a civilian,” Jubair said dismissively. He looked at Maria. “Whatever you believe you know about this man, I would not count on it holding-true in the coming hours. Whatever you believe about the civilian, try to remember that he is now what we were all once. If the Assassin has him, there is little doubt that he believes the civilian will choose to follow him. At which point, Malik is no longer innocent.”

(Because Malik loved Altair like a force-of-nature.)

“There is still time,” Maria said. “Get me a list of every pharmacy in the area that Altair may have gone to for supplies. Look for stolen cars. It is going to be cold tonight and they are not adequately dressed to survive the weather without cover.” 

Jubair nodded and Sibrand sighed.

\--

It took hours, long after the sky had bled into blackness and the temperature had dropped to a frosty fog, before Maria found a college kid looking bored while ringing up pain killers and lip balm that recognized the sketch of Altair. 

“Was he with this man?” Maria asked. She tugged a folded-up-photo of Malik out of her pocket and showed it to him. 

“Yeah,” the kid said, “they were arguing about something. Couple stuff, I guess. I think they bought a flashlight and some stuff. I don’t remember much.”

“Arguing about what?” Maria said. She meant to make it inquisitive but she lost the edge of politeness and the kid’s eyes widened as his stance changed. It was fear that colored his face when he finally managed to drag his eyes away from her breasts. The sound of his throat clearing was as much a white flag of defeat as the scared show of his palms. 

“I don’t know. It didn’t seem important. They were just—bickering.” 

“Which way did they go?” Maria demanded.

“Out the door!” the kid yelped. 

Maria’s growl did nothing to relax him but she didn’t push the issue. Sibrand was at her back with a pop of bubble gum and a stolen candy bar in his pocket. He knocked into her back as she came to a short stop out in the parking lot. There was a single security camera pointed forward toward the bulk of the parking lot. There was a main road in that direction and an entire neighborhood behind the pharmacy. Altair could have gone _anywhere_.

“Fuck,” Maria hissed.

“You should sleep,” Sibrand said. “You’ve been up for two days now, right? Wherever your lover and his boyfriend holed up, the chances of us finding them tonight are nearly nonexistent. He’ll have to move tomorrow—especially if he’s as hurt as you said. Jubair put tales on the Assassins we _do_ know and we’ve got a few of guys listening out for news of something big.”

“Something big?” Maria repeated. She knocked into him with both fists and all but threw him back against the side of the building around the dark corner where there were no cameras to watch them. “Something big. Something bigger than a ghost that nobody has ever heard of that for all we know has been specifically _bred_ and _raised_ to assassinate Robert? Do you understand the implications of Altair’s _existence_? All of our leaders are in immediate and continuous _danger_ unless we can find this asshole and find out how many more there are like him.”

Sibrand tipped his head against the faux stone and smiled at her fury. “Exactly, Maria. You think the Assassins are going to just let us have him? After what your father did to that kid Connor? After they wiped out half of the Assassin compounds on the east coast? This is why you need sleep. You’re not thinking clearly.” He knocked his knuckles against her head and pushed himself away from the wall. “You ought to be more careful. It’s worse for you now. Robert hasn’t ever liked women in the ranks but—well, you know.”

“I’m not Lucy,” Maria snapped. But she relented. There was nothing left to be done tonight.

\--

She slept in her cubical-like-room with her phone charging not so far away from her head and the vague hope that it would ring and Malik would be on the other end of the line begging her to come and find him. It was like a lullaby, that scenario: rescuing him from Altair and taking him somewhere far-away-from this disaster. 

The thought of him in his dreary little-library lulled her to sleep the way his voice in a low drone (reading, always reading) often had in the past.

\--

At four-AM, the phone rang and Maria bolted upright on the pallet-like-bed. The blank-white-screen of her phone was vibrating up-down with an unknown number that took her a half-breath longer than she’d ever admit to understand. Then she ran her thumb across the screen and raised it to her face. Her knees were raised and her body slouched forward against them as she pushed a hand through the unruly tangle of her hair.

“I suppose it’s too much to hope you’re calling to give up,” she said softly.

Altair’s laugh was the same-fucking-sound it had always been. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that you’d reconsider working for some corrupt government.”

Maria laid her cheek against her knee and shook her head ever-so-slightly. The sound of her swallow was audible even through the phone. The same way Altair’s impatient shuffle of feet against some grubby sidewalk was audible. There weren’t many phone booths left, even less in the area they assumed he must have gone to hide in. She was already trying to pinpoint where he was standing by the dull background noise. 

“Listen, this isn’t about you or me—I don’t care what happens to me—”

“You should,” Maria said softly. Because she had seen her Father’s handiwork when all that remained was the corpse of something that looked almost human. 

“Promise me that if I can’t protect him, they don’t take Malik alive.” It should have been an unthinkable request, but even the vague tightening in Maria’s throat and the dampness in her eyes were only pale imitations of any real human feeling. “Promise, Maria,” Altair growled against the phone. “We owe him that.”

“I promise,” Maria said softly. And then with her mouth pressed against her knee to muffle the word like she’d never-even-said-it, she said: “run.”

The phone was disconnected without a moment of pause and Maria was up-on-her-feet and out the door shouting for Jubair and Sibrand and whoever else was nearby to wake up. The central-command was up-and-humming with two wide-eyed-wild-haired men searching for phone booths in a matter of minutes.


	3. Chapter 3

The first stupid thing Altair had done was fall in love with Malik. It had been entirely unintentional from the first moment they met (Altair knocking Malik out by misfortune of running bodily into him at the top of some stairs) but it had been the most precious and surreal experience of his life. Malik didn’t know a damn thing about him (funny how that was still true, in a way) save for the fact that Altair existed and that he ran in the park where Malik went to sit and absorb the simplicity of nature and fresh air. 

They started talking about their mutual fondness for the outdoors (Altair, because he would have preferred any fate to the cramped interior walls of his childhood home, sheltered beneath the ground and raised to do little but kill remorselessly). Malik invited him out for coffee and Altair should-have-declined but he _couldn’t_. He expected to spend the evening with Malik drinking terrible-tasting coffee (truly awful stuff) and was surprised to find that Malik did not drink coffee himself and they were two fools sitting on the patio tables of a busy coffee shop snacking on dry pastries and drinking ice water. 

Malik’s apartment (at the time) was a cramped box like space filled with more books than could comfortably fit, with dingy furniture strategically situated to provide the most optimal reading experience possible. They made awkward attempts at actual conversation that stuttered and stalled just seconds before Malik dragged him into a kiss. Altair was better with his body than he had ever been with his words and it seemed natural-and-wonderful to express how grateful he was to have a chance to feel an attachment for another person.

Altair expected to walk away. He expected to set the memory of Malik on a shelf where he could look at it when he needed it the way he kept the other assorted memories worth keeping. But he found himself week-after-week returning to the bench in the park where Malik sat on his lunch break.

It was stupid to fall in love, stupid to endanger Malik the way he had, and he had known that since the very first moment. (Long before they met Maria, long before they sat in their joint living room discussing if there was enough space for two to become three.)

\--

Malik was asleep, slouched on the cold floor of the poorly insulated shed, when Altair disentangled from him and shuffled out. The air was bitterly cold as he walked back along the path they’d taken to reach the shed. He picked his way along, calling on the long-memorized maps of the city he’d taken as his home, until he came across the beaten, ancient pay phone standing in the lonely corner of a poorly lit parking lot. The all-night convenience store was a neon disaster in the background as he picked up the phone. 

The first number he dialed rang five-times-exactly and then an impersonal female voice answered it. “Name.”

“Altair Ibn-La’Ahad,” he said. The enflamed wound on his side was aching from walking so far. The pain of it brought a crashing sense of realism to the situation that Malik’s persistent presence always seemed to rob from him. 

“Status,” the woman said.

Altair rubbed the bridge of his nose, filed through the useless things he’d memorized as a child until he happened across the single word that would convey his meaning. “Hobbled,” he said. It was as close to his actual status as he could manage.

The woman drew in a sharp-breath on the other end and then cleared her throat. She said, “That’s not good.” It wasn’t what she was supposed to say at all. There was a suspicious silence on the opposite side of the line and then she said, “two hours.”

Altair hung up the phone, dug into his pocket to pull out a handful of coins and dropped them through the slippery-cold slot. He stabbed his finger against the numbers like knocking his bare bones at the metal. The phone rang-and-rang-and-rang. It picked up only just before it should have gone to voice mail. The quiet on the other end was disrupted only by Maria’s half-asleep breathing. He leaned his head against the glass case surrounding the phone. 

Her voice, when it came at last, was the same sleepy-sound that it had been every morning of their life together. That regretful tone in her voice the same as when they were quiet-quiet together protecting Malik from the unfortunate necessity of their early-early morning rising. It was her voice in the kitchen over a cup of black coffee and a plate of microwaved bacon (terrible stuff, Maria said as she ate it). It was her voice in the shower with his body sliding against hers and the tight-vice-grip of her thighs around his body. (Saying: ah-ah-ah, when he fucked her.)

Just before he hung up on her, she whispered the word “run,” like she almost couldn’t bring herself to say it. He bit his cheek to keep from saying anything-at-all and slapped the receiver back against the metal hook that held it.

\--

Altair slid back into the shed and found Malik sitting in the back corner with his knees up and his body leaned forward against them. His hands were pulled up into his sleeves and the hood of his coat was pulled forward around his face to shield it from the chill. “Sorry,” Altair said. “I had to make a call.”

Malik flicked the flashlight on, pointed it at him and let his legs slide down before crossing them in front of him. He motioned with the beam of light at the corner opposite him. “So tell me about it. You actually kill people.”

Altair sat. “Yes.”

“How?”

“Usually with a knife or dagger. Occasionally through noninvasive means. Sometimes, I use a gun but that’s infrequent. I was trained by the old Masters who shunned the new ways.”

“But you watch cartoons,” Malik said. The light bobbed up-and-down but it stayed steadily pointed at Altair and the blinding whiteness of it kept him from seeing Malik at all. “You can’t walk past a puppy without stopping to pet it. You drink fucking fruit punch out of pouches! The single most dangerous thing I have ever seen you do is tell Maria you didn’t like her haircut. You _cried_ when the dog died in that movie.”

“You should not equate my ability to kill with an imagined inability to feel,” Altair said. “Everything that we experienced together means exactly the same right now as it did when it happened. I meant everything I said to you and everything I did with you. I am the same person I have always been, except that my job has changed.”

“To killing people,” Malik said. 

“Bad people. People that want to force humanity into enslavement and eradicate freedom. People that have hurt others, that would have otherwise continued to hurt others. I have _never_ hurt anyone that did not deserve it.” That bit was important to him now but it had not always been. At twenty-three, he had been inconvenienced by the need to avoid innocent loss of life but it seemed unthinkable to him now—that youthful impatience. 

“That doesn’t _matter_ ,” Malik snapped at him. “Whatever happened to you that took away your ability to understand that—it doesn’t matter what these people did because you’re _capable_ of walking up to them and killing them. You brought me back souvenirs from every trip you went on.” His voice wavered there. “Fuck, did you buy them before or after you killed someone?”

“Depends on the schedule I was working under. Usually, I am allowed to decide when and how to kill the target but now and again the decision was made for me and I was only the instrument of death. You are right, I do not understand how you feel. I was never given the benefit of naiveté and ignorance. I was not born by accident or chance but bred to be fast, strong and resilient. I was raised to infiltrate and assassinate. I have known no life except this one.”

The light lowered then, the flashlight rested against the curve of Malik’s knee and spread a white light across the wall to his right. His haggard face was visible in a layer of shadows. “The people you kill—they’re like Robert De Sable?”

“Yes,” Altair said, “they work for him. They do his work for him. My work has been to remove a strategic spread of lieutenants in an effort to force him to come _here_ to restructure his empire.”

Malik sighed. “You’re shivering.”

“Blood loss,” Altair said.

“Fuck,” Malik said again. Then he was crawling across the space between them with the flashlight bumping awkwardly against the concrete floor. He put his arm across Altair’s and pulled his body in against Malik. The awkward slouch made his side hurt freshly as the wound pulled and pinched. Altair put an arm around Malik and took comfort in his presence. “Why the hell did you ever fall in love with me?” Malik said softly.

“Great sex,” Altair mumbled.

“True,” Malik said. “You’re freezing. Whoever’s coming to get you, they’re going to get here soon right?”

Altair nodded his head against Malik’s chest. “He’s short but don’t mention that and he’s very Italian. He smells like olive oil and garlic—don’t mention that. He’ll be pissed but he’s a good guy.” He was tired now, perhaps more tired than he’d ever been before. Malik’s hand was under his jacket pressing at the wound on his side and making a worried little sound. 

“How come you didn’t know about Maria?” Malik asked. His voice sounded like it was coming from the end of a tunnel—somewhere too far away to make out clearly. His hand wiped across the sleeve of Altair’s coat and the grip that had been loose around his body tightened in a completely reflexive way. “I get why I didn’t know, I didn’t know a lot, but not why you didn’t.”

“People like us—Maria and I—we’re very good at being normal. We’re better at it than you are, creating a sense of normality and establishing the idea of being entirely tame and safe. Nobody sees us coming until there’s a knife in their throat. It’s life-saving instinct. I hope you never see us how we are in the dark, Malik.”

There was a shifting against his cheek as Malik straightened. His voice went very level as he said, “was she trying to kill you? Really trying to kill you?”

Altair nodded. “I’d rather die fighting. It’s not as bad as you think. She would have made it quick.”

“Were you going to kill her?” Malik asked.

“No,” Altair said. Then he was just terribly, terribly tired.

\--

The next time Altair woke up it was to the chorus of low-wet-groans that were emanating outward from Malik’s stomach. The man himself seemed to be caught in a dreary snooze, head back against the exposed beams on the inside of the narrow shed. His legs were crossed and his hand was still and limp against Altair’s side where he’d slumped over to half-lay across Malik’s lap. 

It was an unacceptably vulnerable position to be caught in. His body had gone stiff from the cold and the lack of movement. The shock of pain was doing a poor job of keeping him awake even as he purposefully moved in such a way to pull at the wound (finally crusted over and decently closed). Altair found his bag against the opposite wall (sloppy and stupid) and brought it back over to where Malik was shaking himself awake. 

“Sleep,” Altair mumbled to him.

“I keep trying but then I think I hear something and I jolt awake again. This isn’t my life you know. I’m a librarian. Not a lot in the way of hiding in sheds involved.”

Altair crouched with his back against the back wall and set to arming himself against whoever happened to find them first. “I have heard you tell the story of an aggressive card catalogue or two. The dangerous misadventures of idiot college kids mistakenly returning items to the wrong area.”

“Finding and chewing out idiot kids is not the same,” Malik said. He rubbed his stomach in that absent-minded way he did when he was starving-to-death but trying not to ruin a moment. (A habit that had, over the years, been startlingly prominent. He leaned forward with a lurch as if the seductive pull of sleep had nearly gotten him again.

“I have never been the librarian but from the tone of your voice when you tell the stories, this is approximately the same level of aggravating and professionally offensive.” He pulled the straps of the hidden blade so they were snug across his forearm—the leather worn and well fit after so many years of use—and took a gun out of the bag. He considered giving it to Malik, considered the likelihood that the man would shoot himself (or Altair) in the leg and then slipped it into his pocket. 

There was no sound (not a single one) before the door of the shed was pulled suddenly open. The utter lack of warning was as much a calling card of the man standing silhouetted by the rising light of day as the dangerously arrogant way he stood there without a weapon drawn. Ezio was dressed in a runner’s clothes, hardly even posing a threat to a common house plant, but he stepped inside with a presumption of superiority. “Hobbled,” he repeated. “Hobbled is a word we use to mean grievously injured; unable to move independently, in immediate need of evacuation. Hiding in a shed with your boyfriend is not the same.”

Altair got to his feet (easily six inches taller than Ezio, easily six years younger, easier six times more lethal) and motioned Malik up to his. “There was an unexpected development and I could not leave him.”

“Would not,” Ezio corrected. He walked close enough to look at Malik—at the disheveled hair on his head, the civilian softness of his face and body and then down at his hands that had never suffered anything worse than a severe paper cut. “This is an unacceptable risk.”

“So was tracking you ex-girlfriend’s lover for two months but I was obliged to do it regardless,” Altair snapped back. “Malik is important to me and the most pressing threat at the moment is far too aware of that. If I am to be effective now—or ever again—Malik cannot be vulnerable to attack.”

Ezio made a noise like Altair was little more than a ridiculous child and then motioned him forward. Out in the open air, the world was waking up to a bitter chill and a fresh dusting of snow. Ezio’s footprints in the snow were light indentations compared to the deep ruts that Malik cut out as he stomped in the space between them. Malik’s silence was never an indication of anything good. His clenched jaw was almost always a sign of danger (the nonphysical kind) and Altair was preoccupied with trying not to care about it. 

A bullet whizzed by his cheek close enough to slice what felt (at first) like a blast of air against his face that turned wet-and-hot almost instantly. Malik turned in a whirl of disorganized limbs and Ezio’s hand rose in the air as a soundless command just seconds before another bullet struck him in the arm with enough force to knock him forward. Malik grabbed him by the arm and pulled him upward, into his own body and then spun them so Altair’s sagging body was modestly shielded from the bullets.

“Move,” Ezio ordered. He dragged Altair by the good arm and Malik followed after him with a hurry of steps. They fell into the side of a van with Ezio yanking the door shut. There was a wild squeal of tires on pavement as they took off. “Kid, you are the biggest pain in my ass.”

Altair was squeezing the bloody wound on his arm with a weak grip as Malik wriggled back up to sitting after tumbling into the van. Altair laughed (because he could now, because he was as safe as possible), “not true. I’ve met your sister.”

Ezio muttered an expletive in Italian and then climbed through the gap into the passenger seat in the front. Altair didn’t recognize the driver from the hazy view of him he got so he looked back at Malik who was staring at his bloody hand with an amazed laxness to his face. 

“Hey,” Altair said, “I need you to put pressure on this.” He caught Malik’s wrist with his good hand and pulled him close enough to close both hands around the hot pain in his upper arm. It didn’t feel serious (not as serious as it could have been) but it was hardly pleasant. He grit his teeth against the sharp edge of tearing pain as Malik’s hands clenched around his bicep. “Keep it like that, as long as you can.” 

“You followed me around for an hour whining about a paper cut,” Malik said to him. The revelation was voiced like a casual observation but there was an edge of white hysteria that was leeching color from Malik’s face. “An _hour_.” The word punctuated with a pronounced tightening of fists around the bloody wound beneath. The length of Altiar’s sleeve was doing a poor job providing enough traction to keep the pressure precisely where it was needed and Malik seemed to be keen on making up for the difference by squeezing everywhere as hard as he was able.

“Different kind of pain,” Altair said. “Paper cuts hurt.”

“This doesn’t?” Malik hissed back. He was up on his knees, pressing down against the wound now and Altair thought about telling him it wasn’t that serious and decided to let him work it out while he had the chance. “Fuck,” Malik said. He wiped at drip of sweat on his face and smeared a broad-bright-red streak in its place. “Was that Maria?” he said (so low, so quiet, so very uncertain). 

“Probably,” Altair said. He didn’t want to think about that. He’d rather not think about the way the first bullet was a sharp-kiss against his cheek and the second was an angry assault against his body. The third almost certainly would have been a death blow (if not for him, than for Malik). 

“I didn’t think she’d do it,” Malik said. “I can’t—she wouldn’t do it.”

Altair smiled, felt the cold sweat on his face and wondered if Ezio was set up somewhere nice that provided blood transfusions and antibiotics because he was starting to feel gray and hollow. The pain had faded into the background of his mind and that left nothing but the gentle sensation of floating as the car rolled smoothly through the city streets. “Don’t be too upset about it,” Altair said softly. “She doesn’t have a choice either.”

“How about you don’t get upset about it and I will because _someone_ should be pissed about this.” Malik slapped him when his eyes closed and Altair took half-a-second too long to focus on his face in the aftermath. Concentration was slipping away but he was sure he saw Ezio smirking back at him from the front seat.

“Let him sleep,” Ezio said. “Just keep pressure on that wound.”

Malik might have said something in rebuttal but it was lost to the sound of the tires-on-asphalt and the swaying ease of unconsciousness singing him to sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

By the time they reached the shocking upscale estate (because nobody in the world would refer to the enormous mansion surrounded by a twelve foot fence anything less), Altair had passed out. The blood that had been oozing steadily through the gaps in Malik’s grip had come to a slow, uncertain stop and started drying in cracked brownish patches on his arms. His skin was washed out and his breathing was uneven and thin. The van drove into the welcoming dimness of a monstrously large garage where Ezio was out of the passenger side door and barking orders (in Italian, presumably) before the driver even had time to park.

The side door of the van was yanked open and an assortment of men in plain clothes (not suits as he was expecting) looked in stone-faced and unimpressed before setting about yanking Altair out with the least amount of care possible. “Hey!” Malik shouted, “he’s hurt.”

“Dying,” Ezio corrected. He grabbed Malik by the back of the jacket (heedless of the fact that he was at least a few inches shorter and the action seemed ridiculous) and shoved him after the men as they carried Altair toward an interior door. His blood fell in little splatters and droplets, landing in perfectly round red puddles. “Go on then,” he said.

Malik didn’t stay to argue the point after his attempting at a withering glance was met with a brief, pleased-and-arrogant smile. He jogged after the men and found them dropping Altair’s still unconscious body unceremoniously onto a canvas cot next to a table spread with an assortment of medical supplies that seemed woefully inadequate to combat the sickly pallor and clammy sweat covering the man. 

The men (nameless, confusingly silent as they moved in grave circles around him as if they were obligated not to touch him) backed out of the room and shouted down the hall in a long string of Italian that sounded very much like a series of expletives. Their footsteps receded and the resulting silence made the weakness of Altair’s breathing seem that much more impressive. 

In perfect lighting, the caked blood on Altair’s jacket did not seem as unsubstantial as it had the night before. Malik pulled the zipper straight down and worked his arms out of the ripped and filth sleeves expose the simple white shirt beneath. The blood had dried in such a way as to effectively paste the cloth over the wound. It seemed stupid to peel it away before someone that knew what they were doing arrived to help him. (Should such a person show themselves.) Instead, he grabbed the scissors off the table of instruments and started cutting the shirt open. He managed to reduce it to ribbons and bare most of Altair’s chest and stomach. The skin that showed was mottled here-and-there with fresh red-blue bruises. 

Malik sat on the chair by the cot because the alternative was having his legs go out from under him. The immense _reality_ of the situation had been too fantastical to admit to before but the physical proof was spread across Altair’s body. It surrounded him in this spectacular mansion with its finely crafted crown moldings and the high shine of the wooden floor beneath his filthy shoes. “Don’t you dare die,” Malik said.

Altair’s response was the continuing sound of his feeble breathing.

\--

It was five-ten-maybe minutes before a man appeared in the room next to him clutching a bag of blood and a length of intravenous tubing with a bag hanging off his elbow. He was tall (very tall) with ratty blond hair and the distinct look of having been awoken suddenly. Without so much as a word of greeting he dumped the bag of blood and the slippery swollen bag of something clear into Malik’s arms and reached into his back pocket to pull a small package out. He plucked a string of alcohol wipes off the table and went around the opposite side of the cot from where Malik sat. To the arm that hadn’t been shot where he scrubbed at the filth on Altair’s lower arm until he was satisfied it was sterile enough. 

“It’s good he’s unconscious. He hates needles,” the man said. He made short work of starting an IV before looking up to stare at Malik and how he was still standing in the same spot. For a moment he looked as if he were going to start shouting about incompetence but a realization dawned in his face just seconds before he opened his mouth. “You’re a civilian. I forgot.” Then he took the bags and with an infinitely patient tone explained how to prepare them. Then he made Malik hold them up as the blood slowly filled the impossibly long tube that connected to the IV. “They are bringing one of the machines, but it will take a few more moments.” The next thing he took out was a nail and a hook that one might have hung a jacket on. He hammered it into the wall using the blunt end of a screwdriver and then hung the bags from it.

“Who are you?” Malik said.

“It’s polite not to ask questions like that,” the man said. He sat in the chair that Malik had been occupying before and leaned forward to get a jug out from under the table. He produced several rags from the same space beneath the table and set about pouring the water across the bloody ragged mess of the bullet wound on Altair’s arm. “I am a friend. This is not as serious as I was led to believe. The bullet passed neatly through. It just needs disinfected for now.” He looked up at Malik again, narrowed his blue eyes as if he were working through a troublesome problem and then motioned him around. “Use this,” he said and put a bottle into his hand. “Clean it three times, then I’ll show you how to dress it properly.” 

“Yeah,” Malik said. 

When the (nameless) man finally peeled the square of shirt that Malik had not cut away from the wound in Altair’s side the skin at the edges was reddened with irritation, bruised and the wound itself had dried with a definite gap in the skin. From the hiss of disapproval that the man uttered (and from common sense alone) it was easy to tell the sight was a worrisome one. “You’ll be learning how to do stitches today, I think. But I’ll clean this one. We only need to hope he stays unconscious for it.”

“Stitches?” Malik repeated.

“Yes,” then the man was moving past him to pluck this-and-that from the table and set to work cleaning the crusted blood and the pussy scabs away from the wound. Malik felt his face go white at the ruthless efficiency the man showed as he scrubbed the wound and turned his attention down to the arm he was meant to be cleaning. 

\--

Altair stayed mercifully unconscious through the whole ordeal, helped by a dose of pain killers the blond main injected through the IV as soon as the ancient looking IV pump (and pole) was delivered to the room with a bag of clear antibiotics to join the others already hanging in place. 

Malik did an (apparently) adequate job at suturing the wound in Altair’s side and a good enough job at putting a dressing on his arm. The blond man dressed the wound on his side and Malik cleaned the one on his face and rubbed antibiotic salve on it (thinking how much whining Altair would do if it scarred. The vain little peacock would never get over it). 

When the work was done and the standing water on the floor had started to dry in sticky pink stains, Malik sat alone with Altair who was breathing easier (at least). The door behind him was open and the coming-and-going of the house was clearly audible. He listened to it as long as he could before exhaustion dragged him under.

\--

Waking up came as a sudden jolt: the sensation of gravity shifting around him followed by a free fall toward an unknown end. Malik jerked upright in the chair he was slowly slipping out of and grabbed for the arms of it that were not there, leaving him groping at his own legs and stamping his feet to the sticky floor to keep his body upright. The overreaction caused his whole balance to be thrown too far to the left and he tipped the chair and himself over to land on the floor in a fantastic crash of limbs and hardwood. It was only after he shook himself back to wakefulness and took stock of any injuries (none so far as he could tell) that he noticed the other person in the room with him. The man was standing on the opposite side of the table from him, syringe in one hand and the long IV tubing dangling from between his other fingers. His face was illuminated only by the stream of yellowish light coming in from the hallway but his surprised expression was clear enough.

“Sorry,” he said. Then he lifted the empty syringe as he snapped the protective cover over the end of it, “pain medicine.” 

Malik managed to get himself back upright and set the chair up with as much dignity as he could manage. “Yes, good,” he said. 

The man’s smile was a slim thing and then he motioned toward the door. “With the drugs they’re giving him, he’s not going to be up for at least a few more hours. Why don’t you come out and get something to eat. Ezio’s been waiting for you to wake up for a while.”

“Why?” Malik said. But more importantly, “how long have I been sleeping?”

“A few hours. We all had bets on whether you’d fall out of that chair. Leonardo said that you wouldn’t so he’s a few hundred richer than he was, I guess.” Then the man pulled the door open far enough to cast the light across Altair’s limp body. The man was peaceful in sleep, not haggard or hurting the way he had been before. The color in his skin was richer and a hesitant pinkness had returned to his flesh. The bag of blood that had been there when Malik fell asleep was long gone by now. “Come on, he won’t like it if we don’t take care of you. And he’s not someone we want to piss off.”

Malik snorted at that. “We clearly know very different men.”

“Same man, different circumstances,” the man said. Out in the hallway, he didn’t look old enough to be considered a man—not young precisely but not fully grown either. He wore a white hoodie with the sleeves pulled up to his elbows and a vivid black tattoo on his left arm. It was immediately identifiable as a cohesive whole in the few glances Malik had of it. (Just as well, he had the feeling the more he learned the less likely he’d ever be released.) “It’s like Ezio, put that man in a room with kittens and you’d never believe the things he was capable of doing.”

They stopped at the end of the short hall and the man motioned him into the expansive kitchen where Ezio perched on a barstool with one of his feet on the cross bar as he frowned angrily at a spread of photos on the island. The tall blonde man that had attended Altair was standing on the other side wearing a simple red apron with a fine dusting of something white on his hands that could have been flour or powdered sugar (or poison, really). 

Ezio looked up when they came in and smiled indulgently. “Thank you, Desmond.”

“How is he?” the blonde man asked.

“Everything was within parameters, he didn’t even flinch when Malik fell out of the chair.” Desmond picked up an apple out of the bowl on the breakfast corner and then motioned toward the opposite door. It was an unspoken question to be excused and Ezio nodded in a way that was hardly perceptible. 

“Malik,” Ezio said. “You met Leonardo. Resident genius, philanthropist, occasional doctor.”

“I cook as well, when the need arises,” Leonardo said.

Malik said nothing. He stood a few feet from the end of the island—ignored the photos spread across the top of it for as long as possible—and looked at the splendor of the kitchen they were in. The floors were glossy, the walls had a faint shimmer to them and there were oversized framed paintings hanging here-and-there. The cabinets were frosted glass with lighted interiors and the fridge was so massive it nearly took up the full width of the short wall behind Leonardo. Everything was gleaming-and-perfect, not a single dish so much as a half-centimeter out of place. He looked at the photos, the perfect glossy finish on them and the unmistakable shape-of Maria blurred on this picture and that picture and then in perfect clarity on the photo just under Ezio’s spread fingers.

A timer went off and Leonardo stepped back and pulled a pot holder out of seemingly nowhere before producing a delicious-smelling, crispy-golden crusted dish. He set it on a metal tray and flicked the dial on the stove to turn it off. With an easy motion he produced a fork and pushed it across the island toward him. “It’s chicken and vegetables.”

“You should eat,” Ezio said.

Malik should eat because it had been _hours_ since he had anything substantial and the lack of something to fill his stomach had left him with a light-headed stupidity that was churning up with a settling feeling of imminent doom. His life and everything that had been sacred and true forty-eight-hours ago was suddenly a crater filled with blood and broken things. There was a vicious migraine lingering on the edge of his consciousness that was set to crush his skull in a vice grip. 

(And in his head, where only he could hear, he thought Maria might have been making that impatient-noise she made when she said, _you have to take care of yourself, Malik. You worry the hell out of us._ )

“So tell me,” Malik said. He took one step forward. “All I’ve been told is you kill bad people.”

“Do you believe what you’ve been told?” Ezio asked. The lights over his head made something like a halo effect in his dark-dark hair. His face was neither young nor old; but his eyes were an old-man’s. The simple physical strength visible under the fine clothes that he wore was an impressive sight, but the unassuming way he held himself seemed to undermine the obvious threat he could become. (What was it Altair said, something about how they had trained themselves to seem so benign.) 

If Malik had a lifetime (which he did not) to think-it-over and to dissect every-known-fact down to its most infinitesimal pieces, he might still not have enough irrefutable proof to back up the steely resolve in his gut when he looked Ezio-the-Assassin in the face and said, “yes I believe it.”

Leonardo made a strange kind of sound and then smiled reassuringly at him. “You should eat,” he said again.

“Tell me about her. Altair said she was a spy.” Malik took a step forward, set his hands against the smooth, polished island and let his fingertips smudge across the indistinct photographs. The steaming pot pie was close enough to be mouthwatering and Leonardo helpfully pushed it closer to him when he sensed that moment of weakness. 

“We knew nothing about her as of yesterday,” Ezio said. “I have a man working on recovering everything he can about her but so far as he’s been able to ascertain she shouldn’t exist. Maria Thrope is only a name that she made up, and there are no records of her ever having lived anywhere, ever, until about three years ago.”

The silence gaped open for a moment and Malik picked a piece of crust to subdue the burning ache of hunger in his gut. “I can tell you how she takes her coffee, I can tell you what kind of underwear she buys, and I can even tell you want she wants to name her first kid but if her name isn’t Maria Thrope then I know nothing.”

Ezio nodded. “It is possible she could be a spy. Perhaps she works for a government, but it isn’t likely. She is simply too proficient at not existing to belong to any government agency I have ever encountered. Three days ago the three of you were in love, yesterday she tried to kill you.”

“No she didn’t,” Malik said.

Ezio did not argue the point with him but looked at him with some combination of fatherly compassion and intolerable pity. After a moment he looked back at the photograph of her and then cleared his throat and looked toward the hallway that led to the room where Altair lay in a drugged sleep. “The most likely, simplest explanation is that she is a Templar. Robert De Sable does not look favorably on women in his operations but he would accept her if she had proven herself suitably ruthless or if he had not yet had reason to investigate her properly.”

“No,” Malik said again. “Altair said she wasn’t one of Robert’s men.”

“Altair is in love with her,” Ezio said gently. “You may love her but it is not the same.”

“You don’t know that,” Malik snapped. “You don’t know anything about it.”

“We need her alive,” Leonardo said. It was said with such calm reserve, all cool to the touch and completely devoid of accusation or suggestion. The sound of his voice seemed to undercut some mounting tension in Ezio’s face. “That is what he will eventually tell you. He wants to use you to lure her out because she loves you and despite what she is and what she might have done, she very much does not want you involved. If she is only a spy as Altair says than there is no cause for concern. If she is one of Robert’s men—well, we could use her unresolved feelings to our advantage.”

Malik opened his mouth to tell them that they were insane (and the first grating rips of pain laced down the sides of his skull) but Ezio stood up. 

“Do not answer now,” Ezio said. “Eat, think about it. We’ll talk about it again soon.”

Leonardo set a glass of water on the counter just beyond his right hand and dropped two round white pills onto the surface of one of the glossy prints. “This will help the migraine.” Then he left and Ezio followed after him.

\--

Nobody came into the kitchen, by chance or design, Malik was left entirely alone to eat the quickly-cooling potpie and drink his glass of water in peace. The headache that was threatening to crush his skull was held at bay by the two bitter-chalk-white pills that he had swallowed before eating. It was no physical ailment that made his head feel as if it were going to cave in at any moment.

It was impossible to think over the long moments he had spent with Maria to dissect them for any symptoms of a sadistic murderer. He had spent nearly twice as many moments with Altair and never-once had managed to feel even the most subtle feeling of being unsettled (or frightened). There was nothing overtly threatening about either of them. Perhaps the only quality that Maria possessed that marked her as any sort of danger was her near fanatical devotion. (The bacon debacle, for instance.) 

Malik scratched at his scalp through the thick mess of his unwashed hair and tried to reason out a decision he was not qualified to make. Altair might have been able to tell him what would have been the best choice. (Then again, if the man were awake enough to talk, Malik would have been yelling at him.) 

After the pie was gone and Malik was resting his forehead against the cool stone countertop (no closer to resolving the question that had been put to him) the sound of footsteps interrupted his solitude. He looked sideways, beyond the security of his crossed arms and saw Desmond-from-earlier standing a respectable distance away. He was still wearing his hoodie, with a yawn cracking his jaw and a disheveled untidiness making him look even younger than before. His face, in clear light, had a disturbing resemblance to Altair. It was not so great as to be immediately noticeable but a subtle (and definite) sameness to his mouth and the line of his jaw.

Desmond groggily smiled at him and shuffled closer on bare feet. “Brothers,” he said with a motion toward his face. “Same mother, different fathers. I heard that Altair’s dad was kind of a bastard so maybe that was a thing our Mom was into because my Dad’s an ass too. I wasn’t bred though. I’m one hundred percent the product of pure love.”

Malik sat up enough to see Desmond properly as he rifled through the massive pantry behind the half wall. “But you’re an Assassin too?”

Desmond came back out with a box of cereal tucked under one arm and a banana in one hand. He nodded. “I’m not as good as they are yet. But yeah. Fighting for the basic right of all mankind—freedom. Robert and his kind want to enslave the human race in order to bring about peace. We want peace, sure, but more importantly we want freedom. That’s the difference.”

“Do you kill children?” Malik asked.

“No. We don’t practice genocide either. Single, targeted, highly decisive assassinations are our thing. We remove the people who are abusing their power for the Templar cause and when we can replace them with better, more humanitarian people.” Desmond pulled a bowl out of the cabinet and got the milk out of the fridge. “I could tell you the entire history of the Assassin-Templar war and it wouldn’t help you make this choice. If she’s really a Templar, she won’t come easily and she won’t be the woman you loved once she’s here.”

“Then why would she show up just because I’m there?” Malik said.

“She might not,” Desmond said. He stood across the island from him, eating his cereal like this was his everyday life. Save for the sadly sympathetic tilt to his head, he was completely unaffected.

“Fine,” Malik said. (And he didn’t even know why he said:) “I’ll do it.”


	5. Chapter 5

Maria crossed the cobblestone crosswalk that led to the sparse array of cast iron tables where the studious patrons of the Coffee Shop on the Corner sat with their books and skinny tall lattes growing cold in the gathering chill of the late afternoon. There was one and a half hours left of her twenty four to capture Altair without dragging Malik into it. It was unthinkable that the false story of Malik-the-terrorist (so easily believable in these uncertain times, considering where he’d been born) hadn’t already been delivered to the appropriate hands. 

But there he sat, bundled in a black jacket, wearing bright-white-gloves as he stooped forward with a borrowed-book spread open across the tabletop. His drink (something hot and caffeine free, doubtlessly) was sitting just above his left fist. His thick dark hair was limp from lack of washing and there were dark circles beneath his eyes as he rubbed absently at one with his knuckle. 

Maria dropped into the chair that was pulled out for her. “You look like hell.”

Malik started, knocked into the table and tipped his cup over. Neither of them cared much about the spill as it poured out in little pulses. He was staring at her the way he had when she was just an unwelcome interloper in his life. That look he reserved for things that threatened Altair-the-man-he-loved. “I didn’t think you could do it,” he said softly.

She shrugged. “Have you been hurt?”

His laugh was an unwinding spring of stress. He sat back in the seat and shook his head. The edges of his eyes were tight and there was that very pointed squint that meant he had recently had or was very close to having another migraine. “Tell me that you don’t work for Robert, Maria. Please, tell me you’re just a spy like he said you were.”

\--

Her father had not spoken a single word when she had returned from failing to capture Altair with the stink of gun powder on her hands and the sick-and-uncertain knowledge that she’d put a bullet in Altair.

(But no, it wasn’t the bullet in him that made her stomach churn. It was the desperate way Malik had lunged at him, the way he had used his body as cover against the impersonal enemy that attacked without warning.) 

Sibrand and looked at her with a steady-stare saying-but-not-saying: _you have to be more careful._ He’s _never liked women in our ranks and I saw-how-you had a shot you didn’t take_.

Maria (long in the habit of not taking good advice) had spent hours in the crowded little control room coiled tight in a computer chair trying to figure out where the hell Altair had come from. She went over the list of crimes attributed to his skill and found that besides the fact that they simply _had_ to be his handiwork there was no way to identify his teacher or his origin with any definitive proof. He was as skilled with a knife as he was with a bit of piano wire and once the broken handle of a broom. 

Jubair had informed her in the first hour of their return that the man that had swept in to rescue Altair was none-other-than Ezio-fucking-Auditore (attractive in track pants) the single most annoy known Assassin alive. Between the expansive wealth that his murdered family had left him, the connections he cultivated within the Assassin ranks and the many high officials and the sheer strength of his personality. Within the city and close surrounding area he had an unknown number of allies and if he chose, he could have easily whisked both Altair and Malik off to location unknown in a matter of hours. “Basically,” Jubair had summed up, “we’re fucked.”

There was nothing to do but wait for new information and that unhappy knowledge had ticked seconds off the clock. Each minute that passed was another minute closer to forfeiting Malik’s life. And then there was Sibrand, clearing his throat with as much tact as he was capable of. He said, “Malik just ordered a drink at a coffee shop. Either he’s an idiot or it’s a trap.”

Maria spun in her chair. “Or he’s very thirsty.” Either way, there was no way that she couldn’t go.

\--

Oh, but Maria did work for Robert De Sable. Through a series of lieutenants that led straight to his glorious command, Maria was an agent of the man that had plastered himself across the news as a terrorist and war monger. She could see it in Malik’s face, that exact moment when he realized why she hadn’t answered him immediately. And in the next moment, he was on his feet with an agitated shake to his head and a tight clench to his fists as he stormed out-and-away. Beyond the safety of the plain-gray sidewalks and out onto the cobblestone crosswalk heedless of the oncoming traffic (sporadic as it was). 

“Wait!” Maria shouted. She ran out after him (stupid, stupid) and caught him by the arm. “It’s not what it looks like, Malik.”

“It’s not what it looks like?” he shouted back at her. He was easily to pull around, easy to push a few steps backward toward the concrete median. The driver of a passing car laid into the horn with a mighty vengeance that was nothing compared to the reddening anger on Malik’s cheeks. “That man killed _children_ , Maria. He gunned them down in a school; the only reason he isn’t dead right now is because everyone knows but nobody has proof. That man is everything that is wrong in our world in _one fucking person_.”

“Nothing is as simple as that! Humanity needs a villain, so he’s provided them one to unite them. The men that he’s put into power are the ones that will bring the much needed peace and once we’ve got the foundation laid for—”

“Are you listening to yourself?” Malik shouted back. He grabbed her shoulders and shook her as if he could knock something loose inside of her skull that would change everything she believed. 

Maria knocked his arms away and caught the front of his jacket to keep him from falling backward into oncoming traffic. “Listen to myself? I do not have to explain my beliefs to you.”

“Yes you do!” he shouted. It was the start of every fight they’d ever had. His ideology against her stubborn resistance with the two of them knocking their heads together with all the grace of wild animals fighting for dominance. Altair should have been to the side, wearing loose pants and eating popcorn with his shirt off (smirking all the while to himself). Malik’s hands were loosening-and-tightening in cycles of increasing aggravation and no power on earth could have stopped Maria from stepping back into a slant of superiority and contempt as she grinned at his precious-red-face like he was an ignorant little child.

But his face changed in a half-second of realization and his two arms went around her body in a sudden embrace that was too-tight-to-be comforting and too desperate to be intentional. The breath was knocked out of her lungs by the force of the impact of their bodies and collision of their heads as he ducked his down against hers. The glancing blow to her temple was enough to make spots float into her vision that cleared again in time for her to see the curious red dot floating this-way and that on Malik’s shoulder. It was sloppy work to use such an obvious sign, to give her the time to follow the dot back to the man leaning out of a second-story window waving at her with a smile on his face. 

“You brought them here,” she said against his cheek.

“I was angry,” Malik whispered. “You shot him. You really fucking did it, didn’t you?”

“You did this. It’s not as hard as you think it will be, Malik.” She kissed his cheek and stepped backward out of his arms, pulled the gun she had tucked away and pressed it against his forehead. “I made a promise that I would not let them take you alive. It’s obvious that he’s failed to protect you and I cannot in good conscious allow them to recapture you.”

Fear had a peculiar way of making Malik’s lips go brilliant red without doing much to the rest of his face. It was a sudden flush of heat to his mouth that looked like a fantastic spill of blood but the color drained from his cheeks as he shifted a half-step backward. 

“That’s a very bad decision.” By the way of one-liners, it wasn’t a bad one. Ezio Auditore appeared as if summoned (from the very earth itself) wearing a suit much more tailored to his status with one hand pressed so sweetly against her back and a knife slipping up against her ribs. The sharp-end had sliced through the coat she was wearing without as much as disturbing it. “I do not suffer from my brother’s dilemma but I will gladly give him to you and watch what he does.”

A car pulled up behind Malik and the back door opened in a flash of light glinting off the windows before he was yanked summarily backward into the safety of the vehicle. The slamming door was an echo from yards away. Maria turned her head to look at Ezio (shorter in real life). “I was led to believe Assassins did not take prisoners,” she said.

The man who had provided a stunningly effective distraction was walking toward her with a whistle, hands shoved into his pockets up to the exact second he took the gun from her hand and kept right on walking. Ezio spun her in toward his body, arm across her shoulders as if they were lovers and propelled her two steps forward into the path of an oncoming van (one not so unfamiliar to her) and shoved her inside where a man with a sharp-sadist’s grin knocked her unconscious with the butt of a gun.

\--

Maria woke up stripped to her underclothes, hands cuffed behind her back and chained to a single metal hoop screwed into the floor. She managed to get up to her knees with limited effort (albeit an obnoxious pounding ache centering in her left temple) and took stock of the empty room she found herself in. The walls were brilliant white, the floor was white linoleum (from the smell, recently laid) and there were no windows. It wasn’t cold (that was a comfort at least) but it was not warm enough to be sitting in nothing but her undershirt and panties. There was no camera (but then, the Assassins were not known for their technological advances). 

It was a far nicer room to die in than she had imagined for herself. The line of work she often found herself in had lent the air of a back-alley death, her hands dirtied with a dire fight to survive and a single puncture wound in her chest. Cause of death: severed aorta. This room, while far nicer to look at, guaranteed her a far grimmer demise. Not so unlike Father’s penchant for leaving the capture Assassins lashed to wooden chairs in cold-dark-rooms until he had the time or inclination to attend to them. 

(But then, even if the Assassins did not kill her, Robert would not take her back.)

The door opened without the sound of a lock being turned and the brief glimpse she had of the hallway was enough to see they were in a house. Ezio stepped inside, stripped out of the heavy coat and the suit jacket he had been wearing, strode in with his shirt sleeves rolled neatly to his elbows. His forearms were tanned, thick and covered with dark hair. He stopped a few feet from her and with a great show of companionship, he sat on the floor across from her. “You don’t seem frightened.”

“You don’t seem frightening,” Maria said.

“Ah,” he said agreeably. “Mi dispiace. This is not my area of expertise. I don’t have the stomach for it, especially not when it comes to women.”

“A chauvinist and an Assassin, hard to believe you’re real.” She settled back off her knees and crossed her legs. The strain of having her arms pulled back at such a severe angle was making her neck hurt in a way that was impressively difficult to ignore. 

“A number of your kind killed my family. It is the way these things work; I have come to understand. My father was a prominent businessman but he was also an Assassin and he was causing too much trouble. So your kind came and killed him and my older brother and my baby brother. When my Mother resisted they beat her and they raped her and they left her to die.” His teeth were white-and-wet when he bared them at the memory but his face smoothed out again: the genial face of a well-raised son and a gentleman. He said, “but, as I have said, this is the way things are done. My sister and I survived and the men that committed these crimes have all be dealt with.”

“Charming story,” Maria said because it was her turn to say something.

“Yes. Perhaps one more story before I leave you in the care of someone who does not share my aversion. The man that you uncovered two days ago was bred and raised by a particularly dedicated—if sorely misguided—sect of the Levantine Assassins. His primary teacher, for many years, was called ‘the old man’. When the operation was discovered and ended abruptly, the man escaped and rejoined his Templar fellows. And the single survivor of his teachings was hidden with the utmost care.” Ezio shifted minutely, leaned his weight in such a way to rise to his feet, but stopped on his knees. He was looking at her, right into her eyes, with a friendly hatred that felt more like an apology than a warning. “It is my single sworn duty to be sure that the old man never find that survivor.” (You will never leave this room alive.) Then he was back on his feet and turning toward the door. “You are not afraid,” Ezio said again.

Fear was not a feeling Maria had ever been allowed to feel. Father had trained it out of her with repeated trials and relentless assault. It came (now-and-again) as a surge of survival instinct that she had no control over feeling. Mostly, there was the calm assurance that she would either survive or she would die and it was only her wits that would lean her chances one way or the other. “No.”

“Do you imagine that Connor was afraid when he found himself tied to a chair in your Father’s office?” Ezio said. 

Oh-the-boy had been crippled with fear in those long final hours of his life. Bravery was a poor cover for fear but he had bitten his lips through with the effort of it. Maria did not back down from the taunt, or from the implication that they left in their wake. “What do you imagine Altair will do to the men that kill his child?” she said in return. The words slipped through her lips before she had time to think of them and once out were icy-and-bitter. 

Ezio smiled. “I imagine it would be something very similar to what he would do to the woman that held a gun to his lover’s head. He is magnificent in motion. It is a sight you should see before you die.” Then Ezio was gone and the room was silent.

\--

A tall-tall man with blond hair and an apologetic nature came and took her blood only a few minutes after Ezio left her. She left in silence to contemplate the compounding punishment when her lie was discovered. In brief catches of time, between one thought and the next, she spared enough hope that Malik was tucked far away. That he would not hear the sound of her screaming.

\--

It was hours, at least, before the door opened again and by that time she had managed to get her arms in front of her (with great effort) and was sitting with her legs sprawled around the metal hook. She looked up from where she’d been idly picking at the flat screws that held her captive and expected to find some great menacing figure. It was Malik that stood there and just beside him—Lucy Stillman.

“Congratulations,” Lucy said. She pushed Malik forward and closed the door behind her. “Of course, you understand that given your delicate condition that we cannot touch you.” She was wearing white (always white) with her hair pulled sharply away from her face. Her hands motioned in front of her as she spoke to illustrate her point. 

“Delicate condition?” Malik repeated. He looked at Maria (at her naked legs, at the stretch of her bare arms and then at her belly and the unthinkable truth it seemed to contain). His eyebrows drew together in sharp angles and he opened his mouth to ask something. (To demand, perhaps, why the hell her birth control hadn’t worked. To demand how long she had known (zero seconds longer than you knew, Malik) or just to protest.) But Lucy hit him across the face with knife-like precision. The perfect outline of her open hand spread rosy-and-enflamed across his cheek even as he gaped at her in shock.

“Don’t touch him!” Maria shouted at her. She was on her feet in a matter of seconds. Her hands pulled downward by the too-short chain as the cuffs dug into the fragile skin of her wrists. “He isn’t part of this; you aren’t allowed to hit him!”

“Aren’t I?” Lucy repeated. She was a vapid, hateful beast that had slid through the ranks of Templars with a snake-like grace—gaining easy favor with men impressed by the ruthless gleam in her eyes and the exhaustive persistence she employed. Vidic had employed her primarily but she had advanced their cause time-and-time again before she abruptly poisoned an entire Abstergo facility and walked (whistling) back into the fold of the Assassins she had come from. “Ezio said I should any means at my disposal to get the information that we need. I’ve met your Father, Maria. I have watched him work.” 

“Malik, get out of here,” Maria said.

Malik went for the door and Lucy let him jiggle the knob and yank on it hard enough to rattle the wood in the frame. He turned around in time for her to hit him again—a swift, punch to his right side that made him fold forward with a wheeze. 

Lucy stroked his thick-dark hair. “Where is the old man, Maria? What is his plan? I was supposed to get the information but Vidic wouldn’t let me leave him and well—there was you. Robert hates women so there was no way he would tell me anything even if I had gotten close enough. So far as we can tell, Robert has no idea that he’s hasn’t had control of the Templar cause in years.”

Malik straightened again. His face was red and puffy; there was a stream of tears from his eyes as he tried to catch his breath. Maria could see the fear on his face and the way it tensed his body and robbed him of the ability to think. His mouth was hanging open as Lucy turned to look at him with a half-smile on her face.

“Hit me!” Maria screamed at her.

“I can’t,” Lucy said. 

Malik sucked in enough breath to say, “Maria,” and then Lucy hit him once-twice-three times in the soft space beneath his ribs that dropped him to the ground. He was gagging for air as his hands grabbed at his own body as if he couldn’t feel-anything-at-all. Lucy stepped across him and looked down at his body with the air of a well-trained artist. 

It was instinct-not-sense that rattled the razor-sharp scream out of her throat. “Altair!” she was screaming, “Altair!” And in between she was shouting, “scream, Malik, scream as loud as you can.”

Lucy was smiling oh-so-sweetly at her naivety. But Maria was on her feet with blood sticky and red dripping off her fingers from the ripped skin of her wrists. She was bared-teeth-and-sure-as-hell that this woman was breathing her very last breaths. Malik-loved-Altair like a fucking force-of-nature matched only by the reciprocated love Altair had for him. 

Malik yelped-and-shouted and cried out when Lucy hit him and Maria kicked at the chain to try to tear the cuffs off her hands as she screamed (again-and-again) until there was blood in her throat and a dying hope set somewhere in her chest. 

Malik was on his knees spitting blood on the floor, fingers spread across a puddle of his own vomit with his voice gasping, “Maria, please—Maria.”

Maria was trained to die before she said a fucking word but she knew (in that moment, in those split seconds of her name fracturing as it fell out of Malik’s mouth) that she’d tell _everything_. And her mouth opened to announce her failure at the same second the doorframe splintered apart with the force of the impact that pushed the deadbolt that had locked it through the frame.


	6. Chapter 6

It was an odd dream, with strange-shaped-things croaking shrill little screams that bubbled and popped before they got caught in an echo. The screams came from the left-and-the-right and turned in spiraling circles. With the sound a great welling of red rose up from the ground, spewing out of open sores with the grim arterial spurt of a fatal wound. Each scream brought another wash of red, rising-and-rising the tide at his feet. It was hot and thick in circles and Altair was gritting his teeth with his fists like hammers weighing down the length of his arms but he _could not_ move.

\--

Clarity came in two waves, the sharp snap of a door slammed open and the hurried-hurried sound of a worried-worried voice speaking _English, always fucking_ English. There was a shadow on his left side that hung across the boggy red-wetness of his nightmare. The hellish lilt of the screams were billowing out with greater force: the sound of his name ripped from a terrified throat. And cut in low and deep beneath the sound was—

Malik. All at once the fog and the tight lashes of paralysis was gone. Altair was on his feet with one hand on the thin plastic tube that pulled at his arm to tear it out of his arm and then out-out of the room and into the narrow side hallway of Leonardo’s fantastic mansion. (Maintained with such precision by the Assassins who often flocked here for rest and comfort.) It was sixteen steps down a hallway, one (un)locked door, seven steps to the bottom of a hidden section of the basement. There was a young-Assassin standing guard at the doorway, smart-looking and fearful with both hands up and his whole body sliding out of the way.

The sound of Malik’s voice was loud-but-low and the thud of fists-on-flesh was loud enough through the thin-wood of the cheap door. Altair stepped back against the wall opposite the door and threw himself against the door with the full of his (mindless, primal and undirected fury) strength. The room was white-and-white-and-white (an interrogation suite) and Malik’s body against the floor was a dark spot on his elbows and knees crawling toward the sound of Maria’s voice because she was saying:

“Come here, Malik, come to me come on just come over here to me.” Her red mouth and her red wrists and her black-black hair were bright spots set against the blinding whiteness. It was her hands, bound together by sticky-red-metal cuffs that caught Malik and dragged him up against the presumed safety of her body. One-then-two of her legs coiling around him as he curled up against her with his face buried in her flimsy-white-under-things.

Then there was a blur to Altair’s right and Lucy Stillman (spy-extraordinaire) was there with blood-red knuckles and unapologetic fear caught in her wide-worried-mouth. She said, “just calm down, I didn’t hurt him—”

Everything was out of order, the room smelled like blood and Maria was _there_ with both her fingers stroking through Malik’s hair and her voice like a soothing little whisper saying (just _saying_ ): “breathe with me, just like this, put your hand on my ribs and breathe just like this. It’ll pass, just keep breathing, just like this.”

Lucy didn’t move but her head had turned left (toward the door) and she said, “get Ezio, _now_.” Because she knew, like he knew, like Maria looking right-at-him knew. 

Altair was going to kill her. It uncoiled in him like a living fire, blocking everything else out in a fantastic symphony of intent: there was only his heartbeat and her rapid breathing and nothing else at all in the world. He took two steps to the side and she took two steps away, spinning them in a circle and putting herself farther away from the door. He stepped toward her and she attacked him—aiming for the obvious wounds on his body: his exposed arm and flank. He caught her arm and snapped the fragile bones between wrist-and-elbow across the hard crest of his knee. It was a trick he had learned at four-years-old (with the old man smiling oh-so-indulgently and his big-broad-hands smoothing through Altair’s fluffy-brown hair saying: ‘you’re very skilled, little one).

Lucy screamed at him, put her back against the wall and kicked him in the thigh with enough force to push him backward a step or two. There was a repetitive cheeping behind him somewhere, the sound of something familiar calling-calling at him to (remember, remember, remember) but Lucy was there with blood-red knuckles and a smear of blood across her pristine-white-sleeves. Her voice was a throat-wrenching growl when she said, “Maria could have saved him and she _didn’t_!”

Altair punched her and Lucy fell to her knees with her broken arm tight to her gut. His hand grabbed her hair and the feeble resistance she mustered was hardly enough to keep him from bashing her skull flat against the floor. Her death was certain to him as breathing. The only thing that saved her was sudden blister of pain in his injured arm and the arm that went around his neck in the very next second.

It smelled like garlic-and-olive-oil. The smell-and-taste of ( _home, safety, salvation_ ) Ezio fucking Auditore. His voice as smooth and measured as a metronome saying, “I’m not denying your vengeance. Think of your lover, Altair. Think of him first.” Then the arm released him and Altair was on his knees and hands, looking across the narrow room to Maria’s body wrapped tight around Malik’s. Malik was shake-shake-shaking with his arms around her. 

The full reality came in short stabs and the furious bloodlust that had settled so firmly on Lucy only a moment ago shifted cataclysmically. Altair scuttled across the floor—a motion too unrefined for an Assassin of his caliber) and he pulled and pushed at her limbs until he freed Malik from her grasp. He put his body between the two of them and leaned in close enough to her face to hiss the words (sweet-as-any-promise): “you’ll die for this.” He didn’t even know what language he spoke. 

\--

It collapsed—everything, all at once—out from under him. The anger and the adrenaline. The sudden surge of vitality that had brought him precious ignorance from the full reality of his wounds. It crashed with a sudden ferocity that left him falling backward onto the guest-bed Ezio had so graciously allotted for him. Malik was standing two feet from him with a peaked-white-shock on his cheeks and the smell of vomit and blood hanging on his clothes. 

Altair’s arm was bleeding where he’d pulled the IV out and at least a few of his stitches had ripped in his side. His body was weighted and heavy from the cloudy effect of painkillers (and whatever extra drug they’d chosen to use against him). It would have been easier (better) to lay down and sleep away the residual effects. If Malik had been a fellow Assassin they would have fallen easily in bed together with a tumble of graceless, wounded limbs and shared the companionable safety of mutual injury.

Instead, Altair got back to his feet (wondered his shoes must have gone) and reached forward to unbutton Malik’s shirt. The man flinched at the contact but he did not shrink away any further. There were a thousand things he wanted to say (I’m sorry. What happened? How long have I been asleep?) but no way to push sound out of his swollen throat. Instead he eased the shirt off Malik’s shoulder and down his arms, pausing to undo the cuff on the right side and then dropped it on the floor. His undershirt was stretched out of shape and doing a poor job hiding the hot-red-damage beneath. Altair turned to open the bedside drawer and retrieve one of the flat throwing knives kept there (a small token available in every room) to slice through the front of the shirt. It fell too, and the bruises that were forming on Malik’s skin were many but not as severe as he was expecting. 

The sight of them knocked the air out of his lungs. He looked at his face, right at the bruise on his cheek. There was a crust of blood on the edge of his lips. Malik tipped his chin up. But the bravery was a poor front to hide the fear and hurt.

“If you kill her, I’ll never forgive you,” Malik said. The words were hoarse but the resolve behind them was steel-strong.

“Arabic, then,” Altair said softly. “She allowed this.” His hand touched the heated swelling places on Malik’s chest and belly. He pressed his forehead against Malik’s, closed his eyes and tried to remember just a few days ago when they were living in a fairy-tale-world where things like him did not exist. Malik’s hands rested against his chest and there was a nearly imperceptible lean back in against his body. 

“I led them to her,” Malik said so-very-softly. “I betrayed her.”

It was not that simple. Even if Ezio hadn’t managed to convince Malik to play bait for Maria, they would have found her and eliminated the threat she presented to Altair. Malik’s betrayal had been orchestrated by men far more manipulative; Maria’s betrayal in allowing Malik to be beaten was a willful act. Still, this single bit of comfort was the least Altair could offer so he nodded his head against Malik’s. “I will not kill her.”

Then, “you should shower. The heat will help. Someone will bring you painkillers. Rest. I’ll be back.” He was slipping to the side, intent on going to find the things he had missed but Malik’s hand closed around his arm suddenly and pulled him back. 

“Don’t you leave me,” he said.

So he did not.

\--

Desmond came after Malik got out of the shower. They were a poor set sitting on the bed: Malik still tender with fresh pain and Altair preoccupied by unravelling the unknown things. Desmond’s short-hard knock interrupted them. He came with a pile of fresh clothes, a small bag with bandages for any relevant wounds and a bottle of pills for the pain. 

Malik’s stiffening form at Altair’s side could not have escaped Desmond’s attention. He was young (and stupid sometimes) but he had been raised as an Assassin. His awareness of danger was perhaps more acute than some of his older brothers. So he stopped as soon as Malik reacted to him and reached (slowly, so slowly) into his pocket to pull an empty syringe out of his pocket. 

_It was me_ , he did not say. _I woke you up._

“Desmond will not hurt you,” Altair said. “Who?”

“Ezio sent Lucy but he didn’t know about Malik. I didn’t know but I heard her screaming and I thought—it would not have been what you wanted.” Then he held out the things he’d brought. 

“Stay with Malik,” Altair said. He set the clothes down and turned to look at Malik. “I have to go talk to her.” He leaned in to kiss Malik’s cheek and got a defiant stare for his attempt so he did not. Instead he touched him gently on his back where there had been limited or no damage. “You’ll be safe.”

Desmond pulled a second bag out of his pocket. It had two rolls of bandages and a dozen little individual packets of salve. “Her wrists are fucked up pretty bad.” Then, when Altair was in the doorway (almost as if he didn’t want to be the one to say it at all), he said: “she’s pregnant, Altair. Ezio thought it was a lie to save her skin but she really is.”

Altair wasn’t looking at him but at Malik who stared back at him with directionless defiance. Clearly, he had not known about it either. Altair nodded before he left. 

\--

Ezio was easy to find in the mansion. He resided primarily in one of three places: the kitchen when there was food to eat, the office when there were missions to be planned and assigned, and Leonardo’s expansive (albeit cluttered) bedroom when he wished to be alone. Altair bypassed both the kitchen (there was no food cooking or else the smell would have drawn in every novice in the area) and the office (the last mission was chained in the basement) and let himself straight into Leonardo’s room. The bed was centered in the room. Its massive wooden frame was hand carved with a variety of birds-in-flight. The posters rose as high as the ceiling and reflected the light that splintered away from the chandelier that hung from the ceiling. Ezio sat on the chest at the end of the bed, comfortably lounging as he waited. 

“You sedated me,” Altair said.

“This is not your mission any longer,” Ezio said. “It is too personal for you.”

Altair did not take a step forward. Any given day, he could have outmatched Ezio’s considerable skills. His current disadvantage was compounded by lack of food, sleep and emotional security. Ezio was calm, well-fed and well-rested. “It was not before you allowed that bitch to hurt Malik.”

Ezio frowned at the words and got to his feet. “I did not allow it. Whatever you think I am capable of, you should have some faith that I would not condone such an action.” There was enough truth in the words that Altair conceded the point with a slight nod of his head. “Maria’s ‘Father’, the man that tortured Connor to death—it’s the old man.”

(The old man, always hidden in the long folds of his robes. The old man with his weathered voice measured-and-calm. The old man with his long knives and his unshakeable frown. The old man saying, ‘again, Altair, stab her again’ and his fingers like a mother’s sweet-reassuring-kisses, pushing through Altair’s hair. “You are improving,” the old man said before he put Altair back into the dark-little-room.)

Altair swallowed the taste of bile. “You don’t think I can kill him.”

“Not yet,” Ezio said. “More importantly, I will not risk him confirming what I imagine he already suspects. As far as the Assassins and he is concerned: you are dead. There is no reason to risk debunking that belief at this time.”

“What of Maria?” Altair asked.

“I do not know what Maria knows. She is an enormous liability. Even if Robert would easily accept that she’s turned against the Templar cause, her Father would not. She, herself, would not give so easily. If she will not talk—and after what Lucy told me of what happened in that room, she won’t—there is little justification for keeping her alive.” Ezio looked right-at-his-face. Because he knew Maria was pregnant. He knew the baby had to be his-or-Malik’s. (Most likely his.) But Ezio knew, as Malik knew, as Maria knew that Altair had made a choice and it had not been Maria. 

“Very well,” Altair said, “tell Lucy our debt is settled so long as I do not see her again while Malik is still here.”

“That’s very gracious of you.” 

Altair sneered at him, “I’m the soul of compassion.”

\--

Maria was sitting slumped forward in the empty room. Her wrists were raw-red-meat with the sharp edges of the cuffs scraping across the wounds with every slight motion of her body. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was sedate. Altair stepped across the broken bits of the door and sat with his knees bumping presumptively against hers. 

“You said you’d protect him,” Maria said. She opened her eyes and there was the singular expression of the woman he had fallen in love with time-and-time again over the years. The sharp bite of bare-white-teeth furious and righteous. The accusation was thick in her voice but it was nullified in the passive stance of her body. 

“You said as much yourself,” Altair said. “I have seen the news, Maria. Malik is being advertised as a terrorist. They are spreading the story across the country, it will reach the ears of men with great power and poor morals that will order him hunted wherever he goes. That is the protection your kind has seen fit to extend to him. It matches the protection you offered when you bit your tongue and kept your silence while he took the beating meant for you.”

“What happens now?” Maria asked. She was eying the bag in his lap. He looked down at it as well, just barely hearing her as she spoke. “I appreciate the humanitarian effort but there is no need to ease my discomfort if my life expectancy is going to be measured in minutes and hours.”

“Were it my choice, your life would be measured in seconds.” He looked up at her again. “And yet, I cannot condemn you. That man, your Father, creates monsters. It is not surprising you would allow them to inflict such damage on Malik to save your own skin but that you had a moment of doubt at all.” 

“Yes, Ezio told me about you. He said it was his single sworn duty to protect you from Father.” She was masterful to watch. Her face and her voice betrayed nothing at all. Each word was as toneless as the one before. It blended all together into one long drone of noise. 

“I loved you,” Altair said. “I love you. I could have loved you for the whole of my life, Maria.” He leaned forward onto his knees and kissed her forehead with both of his eyes closed. Her fingers scratched at the skin of his throat and grabbed him by the jaw to drag him down to kiss her. Her tongue was an invasion in his mouth and the tight grip of her bound hands an act of desperation. 

“Does he hate me?” was the fevered, uncertain thing she must have been choking on in the time since they left her. 

“No,” Altair said softly.

When she sat back she was as impassive as a statue again, looking at him the way one looked at a repulsive stranger. “I’ll speak to Ezio and only to him. My cooperation for the life of the baby and the assurance that when it’s born it is given to Malik regardless of its paternity.” Her head tilted at the momentary expression of hurt that must have crossed his face. She said, “he is the only one of us with enough morals left to raise a child.”

Altair nodded. “I’ll send him to you.”

“Bandage my wrists before you go,” Maria said. “And if you do love me, don’t ever come back.” Her eyebrow lifted as if challenging him to deny her. He considered leaving her to suffer (triumphant and pleased at the thought) before nodding.

\--

Malik was sleeping when Altair returned to the room. Desmond was pacing back-and-forth across the floor practicing the precision of silent steps. He looked up at the sound of the door opening and offered a vaguely hopeful expression. Then he cleared his throat, “I can fix your stitches.”

“It is not so bad,” Altair assured him. “Go.” He didn’t spare a second glance to be sure that he was obeyed, just crawled into the bed with Malik and touched the familiar softness of his skin. He smiled at the soft mumble of sleepy disapproval from the man and arranged himself in a complimentary curve at his back. Half-asleep, Malik wiggled back until they were touching and a stray smile crossed his face. “I love you,” Altair said oh-so-softly.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not saying it's the end of the whole story. I'm just saying it's the end of this part of it. Epilogue or sequel to follow.

The immediate aftermath was a deceptive lull of energy. Malik woke up wrapped in warm blankets, fogged in pain medicine with a slight twinge in his right side where he remembered but didn’t really full the worst of the bruising was. Altair was against his back (always against his back) and Malik rolled into him. It was wiggle-wiggle-squirm until he was on his back looking at Altair’s slow-waking face as he mumbled dirty little denials to the waking world. His eyelids tightened and then relaxed enough to open. His eyes were soft-brown and looking-right-at-him with a twitch of his chapped lips pulling up at the corner.

They were safe-and-warm under the blankets, far away from (the not-so-distant) reality of what had happened. Malik’s hands moved in long-memorized circles, brushing the backs of his knuckles across the smooth planes of Altair’s chest and then sliding down his back until he got a decent grip on the man’s bony hips. Malik was had the graceful motion of a dancer (the product of years of practice) when it came to pushing Altair flat and climbing onto his lap. The rise of Malik’s body brought a rush of cool air beneath the heavy fall of the blankets. The chill rose like bumps across Altair’s body, prickling his skin and hardening his rosy-pink nipples. 

“Malik,” he said. Just-like-a-prayer. There must have been more he wanted to say, things he thought needed to be put out into the air (shaking and unsure) but Malik ducked down and kissed him. His body was stiff where it was hurt and it mattered-but-didn’t because he was working on ignorance. His two hands fit across Altair’s cheeks and his back arched into the gentle-touch of hands on him. 

\--

Maria waited (oh-so-patiently) in the all-white room with thick bandages over the raw wounds on her wrists. The traitorous thing that grew in her gut felt like a weight that pulled her slow-but-surely into the ground. 

_Look at what you’ve gotten us into,_ she thought to it. 

Then Ezio came, without fanfare, bearing clothing and unhappily offered protection. He sat across from her with the clothes sitting between their crossed legs. He was angry (now, but he hadn’t been last time) and it showed in his eyes and the flat press of his lips. “Before we begin, it is imperative that we have a complete understanding of one another. There is nothing I will not do to protect him. Your cooperation in exchange for the life of the child is only as good as the information it gives us. You will tell me exactly what I ask, when I ask it. The first moment you give us false information is the last moment of your life.”

“If we are to have such a clear understanding, perhaps you should tell me what has happened to Altair that inspires such vapid loyalty.”

Ezio’s smile was mirthless. “You know what was done to him, Maria.”

But she didn’t. She had spent hours of her time concentrating on the chill resting on her shoulders and blocking out the free-floating notions of what Father might have done if given a blank-slate-child to raise as he-saw-fit. Altair was far-more-dangerous in motion that she assumed twenty four hours ago. The man he’d been in their kitchen fighting with bared-teeth and soft-punches was nothing at all like the man he had been in this room. “I could imagine,” she conceded. “The old man is protected.”

“Of course he is,” Ezio said. “He is not my concern. I want Robert and the men directly under him. When the false leader is gone, the real leader will emerge.” Then he pushed the clothes at her. “Not yet. After we have you in a more secure location.”

\--

Altair did not intend to seek-out the woman and yet he found himself standing in a parlor-room with Lucy Stillman. Desmond was looking after Malik (as indiscreetly as possible) and the whole of the house was mobilizing to move their recently-acquired advantage to a more secure location. Altair was dressed in layman’s clothes with the full array of his weapons carefully hidden away but easily accessible. 

“This is cheating,” Lucy said. “I cannot avoid _you_ if you are intent on finding me.”

“Why?” he said.

Lucy sighed. “You cannot break things like Maria with pain. She will not waver from the ideology that has been cut into her bones. There is no tactic, no threat, no promise and no torture we could have devised that would have shaken her loyalty. The only hope we had to force a change was to appeal to what little humanity she has left. You’re useless against her because she knows that you are exactly like her. But Malik? He is a librarian with headaches; he’s innocent and _defenseless_. And she loves him.”

“You have spent too many years in their ranks, Lucy. That is not what we do.”

Something changed in her face (if only for a second), perhaps something more real than Altair had ever seen before. She looked down and sideways (but not at him) when she said, “I thought she’d break. I didn’t think she’d—I didn’t think she could let it happen.”

Altair did not nod at the words but flex his fists in an unsatisfying imitation of the violence he wished he could unleash. He said, “safety and peace.” When it was the farthest thing from what he wished for her.

\--

Desmond broke it to him gentle. It went something like this:

“Well, you’re all over the news as a terrorist. Your house is in ashes. Your former boss is staring at TV camera’s mumbling things about how you seemed so normal. There is literally nothing left for you here except certain death.”

“Terrorist?” Malik repeated.

“Templars are efficient if not terribly inventive bastards. It’s an easy lie. If they wanted me, they would say I was a rapist maybe. Ezio would probably be wanted for fraud or embezzlement. I’m not sure what they would say Ezio did. They might not even try to go after him like that. I think if they ever made an attempt on him it would be something old fashion like a sniper rifle.” Then Desmond was shrugging the whole notion to the side as if it were so easy to shrug away the fact that Malik was a known-terrorist-now. 

“What about Altair? Would he be a terrorist?”

“Altair? No.” Desmond scoffed at the very idea. “They wouldn’t put him on the news. Look, the point wasn’t to try to figure out how the Templars would fuck us over. The point is we’re moving you to a different location until we can manage the threat.”

Malik drew in a breath and let it out again. His tongue on his lips was a wet slip against cracked-skin with the taste of blood in his mouth. “Fine. Altair is going too?”

Desmond nodded. 

\--

The actual move from one-location-to-the-next was managed with startling efficiency. Maria was offered the choice between drinking a sedative or being injected with it. Out of simplicity, she chose to drink and fell asleep on a cushioned mat in the white-room but woke up in a wood-paneled bedroom. There were no chains and no restraints to keep her tethered to the foot of the bed. There was a plush chair, a small round table and a selection of books on a short shelf in the corner. There was a window (reinforced several times over, several inches thick at least) that gave her an expansive view over a snowy garden and a seemingly endless forest of bald trees. One small door led her to a closet filled with clothes in her current size. Another door was a bathroom stocked with the necessary toiletries. 

“As far as prison cells go, this one’s not that bad,” she said to the cameras that she were sure were there. 

She took a shower to wash away days of grime and bad decisions and sat in the chair facing the bright-bright sunshine wearing nothing but a bath towel.

\--

Altair had grown impatient with age. The bloodlust that had haunted him in his youthful days had been tempered with practice and methodical meditation but his patience wore through faster-and-faster the longer he was denied the vengeance that was rightfully his. 

“You have to heal,” Ezio shouted at him in the first days after the move.

“I have healed!” Altair screamed back at him. And he left because he was spiraling-out-of-control, fingers grasping for knives that he couldn’t trust himself to have. He stormed around the fine house (one of Ezio’s, this one) and then back to the bedroom he’d been given to share with Malik.

Malik was there, still in bed, and Altair stared at him from the doorway. His breath was stilted and stalled in his chest in those seconds before Malik half-turned to look at him and offered the slightest of smiles. His fingers curled to beckon Altair over to him. It was the smallest and most sincere of comforts to know that his body still fit against Malik’s with the same ease.

“I’m sorry,” he had taken to saying with his fingers threaded through Malik’s.

Malik shushed him. Again and again, refused to hear the words even as he held on so-very-tightly to Altair’s hands.

\--

For the first month, Malik cycled through denial, exhaustion and moments of heightened aggravation not so unlike the time he had nearly slammed his baby brother’s head in a swinging door (on purpose) when they were children. Denial sent him to the library (because of course a sprawling mansion such as this one had a library) to sort through the poorly stacked books left lying everywhere on the massive wooden shelves. Exhaustion kept him tied to the bed with weights on his knees and elbows. Altair found him in those moments of nothingness and took up space against his body with the long-coveted and long-appreciated sameness. 

But the anger that took him by the gut felt like something trying to tear its way out of his body. Those were the days that he walked-and-walked-and-walked to find anything (at all) to stop the gnashing of his teeth and the pitiful tightening of his fists. Altair was absent on those days, off to hide among the others like him. Malik hated-him-most on days like that when the raw wound they shared was too painful to bear. 

“I want to see her,” is what he finally said when the anger had bled through him like acid and a month of trying to wait-it-out left him with nothing but a bitter taste in his mouth.

Ezio was not always there, but frequently found in the kitchen when he was. He did not pretend to misunderstand the demand but he was kind enough not to laugh at Malik’s face. He flattened a white towel he must have been using to dry his hands. “On one condition,” he said.

“What?” Malik.

“Tell Altair you forgive him so I can trust him in the field,” Ezio said. It was such a calm request. “What happened to you is unfortunate. The anger and hurt and confusion that you feel is expected and healthy. But nothing will ever be what it was. You have to make a choice now to move forward.”

With fury-like-fire stuck in his chest, there was nothing in the world Malik wanted less than to tell Altair he was forgiven for destroying his life. He could not break the tension in his jaw long enough to say a damn word (and even if he could, he was not sure that he would). But he’d come to demand his way into Maria’s closed-off-room and he was not going to leave until he’d managed it. So he nodded and Ezio nodded in return. 

“I cannot give you complete, free access, of course. When I am here, I will allow you to see her whenever you wish.”

\--

Maria had settled into the monotony of her life. Food arrived at two hour intervals, a steady diet consisting of all of her favorite things mixed here and there with foods that were clearly best for the baby. She was never hungry, never thirsty, and never uncomfortable in any physical way. Ezio’s visits, when they happened, were not confrontational or abusive. 

She was permitted a MP3 player filled with all of her favorite artists and a wide sampling of classical music. Fresh books and magazines were delivered to her with regularity. 

But she spent the hours of her day looking out the window, watching for the off-and-on days when Malik paced the back yard under the watchful eye of the well-hidden Assassins. She stared out the frosted glass as Altair vented his frustration in fast sprints back and forth across the snow-crusted ground. She thought about what they might have been doing far-and-away from here when they were one-and-whole.

The door opened at her back after hours of watching Malik snarling at the cold air. She expected Ezio (he had arrived yesterday) but the smell of hot-hot-chocolate made her lips curl up into a smile that she could not have prevented even if she had tried. It was etched into her memory as surely as pickles-and-peanut butter. 

When she turned around, Malik was standing there looking healthy-and-whole, with a steaming mug of hot chocolate in one hand. His empty hand was hanging loosely against his thigh as he made strange faces into the middle distance between them. “Hi Maria,” he said after a moment.

She got up and walked over to stand in front of him. He was inches taller than her (just an inch and a half shorter than Altair), broader and heavier than her. But he was made of fragile, human things and it showed in the whistling restraint of his breath and the shift of nervousness at his feet. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“I’m a naïve, gullible idiot,” Malik said. He pressed three fingers against her lips before she could object. “I’ll never know the things that you know. I’ll never be like the two of you are. I don’t have the ability to understand how you think or what you’re capable of withstanding or feeling. But I know,” he nodded, “I _know_ that you’re not sorry. That if that woman walked in here now and hit me because you wouldn’t talk, the exact same thing would happen.”

“But I wished it wouldn’t,” Maria said with a crack in her voice. 

Malik held the hot chocolate out toward her. “I forgive you.” 

She took it and he nodded his head again and then turned to leave. Maria wanted to say something (anything at all) that would make him understand, that would give him a half-breath of peace but the door was opening and he was sliding-out while Ezio stepped-in. He was not smiling, not proud at all, but weary as he shut the door softly and put his back against it. 

“Does he know you’re going to kill me when this is over?” Maria asked. The cup was hot enough to scald her palm and she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“I imagine he knows far more than you’d be willing to give him credit for. Have I told him as much, outright? No. Tell me how to find Robert, Maria.”

“Altair must be recovered,” Maria said. She set the cup to the side before she opened her mouth to betray the leader of her cause.

\--

It was long-after-dark. Malik had and he had been doing such a wonderful job pretending to sleep that it was nearly startling when Malik said, “I forgive you.”

“How could you?” Altair asked.

Malik rolled onto his back and looked at him. The light was dim from the adjacent bathroom but it was enough to make out the expression on his face. “I’ve been reading your books. This isn’t the life I wanted. This isn’t a life that I could have imagined. But there is no escaping it now. I could be mad at you forever, I could hate you for falling in love with me. I could hate you for being the thing that you are and it would not change what has happened. I love you. I believe your cause is just. So I forgive you, if that is what you need. I support you if that gives you peace.”

Altair nodded and Malik pulled him close enough to kiss. There was no passion in them, but the slow-and-sleepy _need_ to find the thing that held them bound together. Altair wiggled low enough to rest his head on Malik’s chest. He listened to the steady thrumming of his heart as he had (again and again) in the many years since they collided. 

\--

Malik woke up to an empty bed but Altair did not leave to attend to his mission (a business trip, he used to say) until late in the morning. The details were not commonly shared but everyone except Malik seemed to know what they were. Ezio was still at the house, taking up space between the kitchen and the training center. 

“I want to see her,” Malik said.

So Ezio took him to Maria’s room and opened the door(s) for him. He found her sitting in the same chair with her knees up to her chin as she looked out the window. She turned to look at him with a subconscious smile at the edge of her lips that faded instantly away. “Hello,” Maria said.

“I told you his aversion to condoms was going to get you in trouble, didn’t I?” he said. It was out of place in the prison-cell of a bedroom where they found themselves but it was what he would have said to her if they’d been at home sitting around a positive pregnancy test. 

Maria did smile at him. “I like to live on the wild side, Malik. And as I recall it’s an aversion you seem to share.”

“Well, what’s the point in insisting when I was outvoted?” Malik asked. He looked around for somewhere to sit and ended up sitting on the end of the bed. “I tried to be the voice of common sense.”

“I wanted a dozen babies when I was young,” Maria said. “My mother, before she died, she used to tell me how I would have had six brothers and six sisters if only she’d had the time and good health to have them. I grew up alone and I hated it.”

“A dozen is too many,” Malik said. “One or two seems better.”

Maria walked over to stand in front of him. “Take your clothes off.”

\--

Maria didn’t intend to have sex with Malik when she helped him strip naked. It was a vague backward thought somewhere in the back of his head trapped neatly behind the idea that Altair still got to lay next to this man every single night. It was jealousy-and-spite that made the words slide out of her mouth but it was an undeniable _need_ to feel another human being that had them laying on her narrow little bed in her comfortable prison cell. 

Malik kissed her first and it spiraled out of control from that moment-on. She clawed and bit at him. He held her down with big-soft-hands and fucked her hard-and-relentlessly. But when they were exhausted, he kissed her like he loved her. His fingers were plucking the wet strands of her hair away from her breasts as he laid at her side. “What do you want, a boy or girl?”

“I hadn’t thought about it. What about you?”

“A girl,” Malik said. “She would ruin Altair. He’d be helpless against her and it would be hilarious.”

“But not a boy?”

“No. He would expect too much out of a son.” He propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at her with a sigh. “I can’t stay long.” (Like, _please don't die_.)

“Stay a little longer,” she said. (Like, _I'm already dead._ ) She pulled him down and rolled so she was laying across his body. His hands were against her back with idle motions of his fingers and she closed her eyes. "Promise me you'll take care of him." Because it was _important_ to her (now) the way it had been important to him (once) when they were still fresh-and-new at sharing. Malik didn't answer her but kissed her cheek and squeezed his arms around her body.

\--

Robert’s death, after the catastrophe of the last assassination attempt, was an anticlimactic affair. He stepped onto the elevator of a public hotel (high-class, surely, owned primarily by Templars, of course) and Altair (resplendent in a bell-hops uniform) stabbed him twice with the hidden blade. The body guards that had been brutish and rude about sharing the elevator with the help had made a feeble attempt to avenge their fallen leader. Altair sliced their throats and made a modern-art-masterpiece across the polished white elevator walls. Then he let himself out on the next floor. It was a simple matter to find an empty room, use the master key to open it and slip out through the window. 

Altair was back in the safe house with a sense of euphoric calm in his chest before the news broke that Robert De Sable had been assassinated. The resulting coverage of the event made a poor, paltry attempt to drum up sympathy for him. Succinctly summarized by a middle aged white man who looked directly in the screen and said, “well, who wouldn’t want to kill him?”

Ezio was there. “All hell is going to break loose.”

Altair nodded. “Let it.” 

Back at the mansion (two days later), he set a snow globe he’d found in a souvenir shop not far from where he’d killed Robert, down on the bedside table where Malik could see it. Then he stood a safe distance away, hands in his pockets and breath stuck in his throat, waiting for what the man would do. 

Malik blinked at the thing and scrunched up his eyebrows and nose as he did when he woke up too soon. “Come to bed,” he said. So Altair did.


End file.
